Addressing the Consumer

Addressing the Consumer

Ben Fine

Knowing Consumers: Actors, Images, Identities in Modern History.

Conference at the Zentrum für Interdisziplinäre Forschung in Bielefeld, Germany

February 26-28, 2004

Nothing in this paper may be cited, quoted or summarised or reproduced without permission of the author(s)

Addressing the Consumer*

Ben Fine

Department of Economic, SOAS

1 Introduction

Knowledge and identity of the consumer are heavily bound to consumer culture, attributes of which are discussed in the following section in terms of its being contextual, construed, chaotic, constructed, contradictory and conflictual. This leads in section 3 to the argument that an understanding of capitalist commodity relations offer an appropriate starting point for addressing consumer culture (even where consumption is not directly dependent on market provision). The corresponding approach to the culture of consumption is illustrated by examples in section 4 (although a wide variety of case studies is referenced throughout). The closing remarks bring out some of the broad implications for the politics of the consumer.

2 Consumer Culture

It is now more than twenty years since the study of consumption became the object of intensive study across the social sciences. It is an opportune moment to take stock and offer some necessarily partial assessment of what we do know, and what we do not know, about that elusive object/subject of this collective endeavour – the consumer. Our more recently garnered knowledge, however, has not sprung anew from nowhere, for the consumer has long been studied for a variety of purposes from marketing through to social commentary. At one extreme, at least in some respects, stands the discipline of economics and its fabled homo economicus, rational economic man, and rarely acknowledged as potentially female.[1] He sets about maximising utility subject to budget and other constraints, increasingly across all activities of which consumption choices are but the most prominent.[2] A simple and single-minded calculus of pleasure (spending money) and pain (earning it) is presumed to suffice to grind out consumption, essentially understood as equivalent to market demand. Otherwise we learn nothing about consumer and consumed. Indeed, these key categories are inevitably designated in the most anonymous form as algebraic rather than semiotic symbols, as in the standard utility function of elementary microeconomics, ui (x1, x2, x3, …, xj, …, xn), where individual i gain utility from goods xj. Further, in the virtual world of perfect competition, the humble consumers become noble sovereigns, dictating what is produced and setting in place the efficient allocation of resources for society as a whole.[3]

Not surprisingly, as a discipline, economics has not participated in the academic consumer revolution, confining itself to ever more sophisticated methods for estimating demand on otherwise unchanging assumptions of the sort laid out in the previous paragraph. The discipline has exhibited scant regard for concerns around the nature of the consumer and of the consumed, part of a more general neglect by economics of the postmodernism that has ripped across the other social sciences.[4] So, at the other extreme to economics stands old-time consumer studies. It has been eclectic in method and wide in scope, closely aligned to the study of marketing and advertising, and more concerned with the psyche of the consumer as with, more often than not, her spending power. Given a radical twist, the sovereign consumer is deposed and becomes victim to the manipulative hidden persuaders in pursuit of what are deemed to be artificially created, even false, needs.[5]

To a large extent, consumer studies was, and remains, ignored by the new literature. With some justification, it has been perceived as predominantly low-brow and, at best, middle-brow, compared to the high theory of postmodernism. Yet, within its own vernacular, consumer studies offered lessons that came to be re-invented by postmodernism. First is the idea that consumers have multiple identities. This is not simply a matter of socio-economic status, varied though these are by class, age, race, gender, location, income, education, household characteristics, etc. The individual is interpreted as incorporating and acting upon an equally varied set of attributes, although the attempt is made to aggregate these into identifiable and targetable life-styles. A modest list of factors in identifying the consumer includes, Fine and Leopold (1993, p. 59):

High or low involvement, arousal, attitude, affect, attributes, intention, reaction, learning, satisfaction, expectation, atmospherics, environment, context, convenience, memory, familiarity, judgement, choice, impulse, generics, cues, status, brand, impression, class, time, age, inference, endorsement, stereotyes, community, socialisation, norms, knowledge, lifestyle, enthusiasm, materialism, culture, self-perception, routinisation, stimulus, sentiment, role-playing, psychographics, mood, encoding, focus, situation, adaptivity, opinion, leadership, imagination, variety, scripts, vividness, disconfirmation, precipitation, persuasion, reinforcement, reminder, seduction, aesthetics, humour, etc.

Not surprisingly, Lord Lever could claim that 50% of his advertising works but the problem was that he did not know which 50%!

Second, by the same token, not only the consumer but also the consumed takes, or appears to take, on multiple lives of its own. In most extreme form, Appadurai (1986, p. 3) suggests:

Focusing on the things that are exchanged, rather than simply on the forms or functions of exchange, makes it possible to argue that what creates the link between exchange and value is politics, construed broadly. This argument … justifies the conceit that commodities, like persons, have social lives.

On a more mundane level, before adverts came to be deconstructed, they had to be constructed, and there is no reason to believe that the one has been handled with any greater degree of sophistication and complexity than the other. Objects of consumption, by whatever means, are endowed with the qualities construed by consumers, in part through a system of signs. These can float free from the material properties of the objects themselves – as in the idea of coke as the “real thing”, an imaginary reality that is shifted to suit time and place. Consumers and consumed reinvent themselves or are reinvented by others on their behalf. For mainstream economics, objects of consumption serve a given (and limited) identity represented by a utility function through their given material properties. For postmodernism, consumption is a source of shifting and multiple identities grounded in symbolic properties. Indeed, Baudrillard’s simulacrum of desire can be interpreted as a nightmarish restoration of consumer sovereignty through collapsing the material to a symbolic world within the mind.

No doubt I oversimplify and exaggerate to the point of parody. But I do so for a particular purpose, to learn a third lesson (and more). For, in recognising that the consumer/consumed has multiple identities, like culture, ideology, systems of belief or whatever, it is necessarily subject to what I have dubbed the six Cs.[6] Thus, the culture of consumption is contextual, construed, chaotic, constructed, contradictory and conflictual. It is worth elaborating on each of these.

By contextual is meant that the consumed is not only located in specific circumstances (high or low price, good or bad quality, etc) but that these are associated with particular and variable meanings to the consumer. The meaning of the same dress is very different according to time and place as has been recognised in the past through sumptuary laws, and in the present by virtue of power (and casual) dressing, with jeans and varieties of footwear moving flexibly between work clothes and fashion item. The consumer is far from a passive recipient of the meaning of objects of consumption, and is active in creating that meaning. But the consumer is not liable to be able to command a monopoly in doing so, not least because that meaning is both internalised from without (what does consumption mean to the consumer) and interpreted by others (not least in consumption for display).[7]

Thus, consumption is construed. But the process of construal is heavily influenced by a multiplicity of factors derived from context. This is illustrated by the shifting meanings over time, place and people (and objects of consumption) of the distinction between luxuries and necessities. It is not simply a matter of shifting the boundary between the two, in favour of the former with rising affluence. For the meaning of the two, and the distinction, changes over time. Just as one person’s meat is another poison, so a luxury to one is a necessity to another.[8]

One reason for this is that there is a tension between tying the distinction to what can be commonly afforded and to attaining a socio-economic status (that cannot be reduced to income alone except possibly at a point in time). This leads to the recognition that the meaning of consumption is not necessarily coherent, as different meanings are articulated together. A cream cake for someone on a diet can be both a luxury and “naughty but nice”, simultaneously reward and punishment.[9]

The source of such inconsistent or chaotic attributes is not entirely nor predominantly internal but derive from how the item of consumption has been both materially and culturally constructed, something that runs deeper than construal. The “sweetness” of chocolate for example, and its different meanings to men, women and children, depend upon the material properties of chocolate itself (and what is manufactured as such) as well as the gendered and other meanings of sweetness.

The construction of the consumer is also contradictory in the dialectical sense of being deeply rooted in social forces, structures and processes that interact with one another to give rise to complex outcomes. This is well-illustrated in the peculiarly modern pressures both to diet and to eat. These have given rise to what are termed the diseases of affluence as their influence is felt at the level of the individual – not only in heart disease but also in obesity, anorexia, and bulimia.[10]

Not surprisingly in view of these other attributes, consumer/consumed is subject to conflict in the making of meaning. In a way, this is how the ideologies of consumer sovereignty/manipulation can be interpreted, an attempt at persuading consumers how they should perceive of themselves. But conflict over the meaning is not confined to the relations between producers and consumers. Conflict over consumption can be initiated by those who are neither producer nor consumer as is sharply brought into focus by campaigns against particular consumption goods in light of the way in which they have been produced – to the detriment of the environment or wages and working conditions.

3 Capitalist Commodities and the Consumer

On the face of it, appeal to the 6Cs, and more, would appear to render the consumer even more elusive. How these attributes interact with one another is highly complex and diverse. But this does not mean that there is no place for generalities although general theories are bound to fail. The latter tend to take one of two forms. One is horizontal theory, usually drawn from within a discipline and applied across all consumption, Fine and Leopold (1993). This is true of the demand theory of mainstream economics that treats all consumption as a theory of choice in the satisfaction of preferences, and of theories of emulation and distinction (stratification) within sociology. Otherwise, as with the notions of consumerism, consumer society or consumer revolution, aspects of consumer behaviour are (over)generalised as socially driven and historically specific characteristics.

The problem with such generalities is the extent to which they are empirically more observed in the breach. This is hardly surprising in view of the complexity and diversity of the determinants of consumption. On the other hand, it is too nihilistic to draw the conclusions that there are no regularities. Surely, when Ritzer (1993 and 1998) points to McDonaldization, he has achieved some purchase on the nature of contemporary consumption even if everything is not and cannot be hamburger-like (quite apart from whether all hamburgers are themselves the same). Analytically, though, the problem of starting with McDonalds is that it sets a standard against which both theories and other consumption goods can be judged but it does not and cannot justify that theoretical norm.

There is, however, a more general property of the humble hamburger that points to an appropriate starting point in the study of the consumer: that it is a capitalist commodity. Its appeal as point of departure in studying consumption and the consumer rests on the following arguments, with objections anticipated both to strengthen the case and to elaborate and refine it. First, the contemporary consumer is heavily embroiled in the world of commodities as is acknowledged by notions such as consumer society, globalisation, and McDonaldisation. This does not, however, mean that all commodities are produced, distributed and bought and sold in the same way. Much of the current understanding of the consumer is based upon a putative shift from Fordist to post-Fordist (“flec-spec”) modes of provision.[11] Such ideal types are simply too crude and empirically questionable as generalities.[12] Commodities are highly diverse in how they reach the consumer, let alone in how they are consumed.

Nor does emphasis upon the commodity lead to an undue restoration of consideration of production over consumption, of material over cultural factors. This is to see the commodity as unduly reduced to its property as exchange value, as price. But classical political economy, and especially Marx, defines the commodity as both exchange and use value. This implies that qualitative social relations are in part formed and expressed quantitatively. What you consume, and what it means to you, is heavily bound by how much you can afford, a sort of consumer democracy in which some have more votes and freedoms than others. Thus, for example, there is a major tension between meeting the requirements of mass production and sustaining distinctiveness for commodity and consumer (lifestyle for sale means access for all). But it necessarily follows that consumption patterns, and meanings, cannot be legitimately derived from class relations of production although this does not mean that such class relations in their broader context are irrelevant to consumption.[13] But class, production and exchange value are readily left behind in embracing the pertinence of sign value. Whilst the leading villain in this respect has been Baudrillard, his stance on the rejection of Marx has continued to be readily accepted even though much else of his work has now been rejected as too extreme.[14]