Understanding the Modern Consumer Culture :: BTEC Business Marketing GCSE Coursework

Understanding the Modern Consumer Culture In The Rise of Consumer Society in Britain, John Benson identifies consumer societies as those "in which choice and credit are readily available, in which social value is defined in terms of purchasing power and material possessions, and in which there is a desire, above all, for that which is new, modern, exciting and fashionable." For decades research on the history of consumerism had been winding the clock up to the nineteenth century as the starting point of a culture of consumption that fits Benson’s description. For societies like these to exist, there needed to be a fair portion of the population with enough money to purchase goods beyond daily necessities; there needed to be powerful productive forces to make enough goods available and allow for new strategies of marketing and selling; there also needed to be a tendency among people to start investing social meanings and emotions in the acquisition of goods. Industrialization, these histories tell us, prepared the grou nd for a consumer culture to develop thanks to malleable markets, large production lines, rise of shopping, advertising, marketing, etc. In Consumer Culture and Modernity, Don Slater argues against a "productivist bias" which misleads into believing that production is the "engine and essence of modernization" (p. 16). Through a brilliant overview of the literature of revisionist historians, he traces the development of consumer culture from the present day to the early modern period. A consumer revolution, with the characteristics Benson suggested, was emerging as early as the sixteenth century. A new ‘world of goods’ deriving from colonial exploitation led to a wide penetration of consumer goods into the lives and homes of more social classes. Towards the eighteenth century a growing consuming public bred a desire for the new and created new demands and new styles. Contemporary features of consumer culture existed in the early modern mind, but they were recognizable in different forms. Under the disguise of commerce and trade, not production or consumption, the early modern man came to contact with a new ideology of free exchange, not only of goods and services, but of ideas, opinions, and meanings as well. Consumer culture, according to Slater, is not a reference to a recent phenomenon: it is rather part of a new terminology that came to replace the notion of civil society, which itself is born to modernity. The ideal of autonomous individuals rationally pursuing their interests in a free market – a notion so much cherished within consumer culture – stands at the heart of the project of modernity in the eighteenth century.