Definition of the term

The term consumer culture is a multi-faceted one. In consumer culture theory, consumption refers to acts of acquisition, use and disposition of goods, services, ideas, and experiences in ways that produce both desired use values and values in the normative sense. Arnould and Thompson (2005, p. 868) describe some of its key components in the following way:

The consumption of market-made commodities and desire-inducing marketing symbols is central to consumer culture, and yet the perpetuation and reproduction of this system is largely dependent upon the exercise of free personal choice in the private sphere of everyday life… The term “consumer culture” also conceptualizes an interconnected system of commercially produced images, texts, and objects that groups use—through the construction of overlapping and even conflicting practices, identities, and meanings—to make collective sense of their environments and to orient their members’ experiences and lives. These meanings are embodied and negotiated by consumers in particular social situations, roles and relationships. Further, consumer culture describes a densely woven network of global connections and extensions through which local cultures are increasingly interpenetrated by the forces of transnational capital and the global mediascape.

Consumer culture, therefore, encompasses elements that are grounded in a specific sociocultural context and others that flow through the global circuits of corporate capitalism. Consider, for instance, that East Asian consumers snap up Finnish Marimekko fashions and souvenirs of the animated Moomin characters, while LVMH promotes a mythic image of French luxury desired across the world. Disney films globalize idealized models of girlhood, while Bollywood diffuses happy dancing gender stereotypes, and exported Latin American soap operas animate local debates about family values to consumers in Africa. Importantly, consumer culture is fundamentally shaped by processes of “glocalization,” whereby local and global elements are merged into unique cultural forms in different parts of the world so that for example, branded and franchised “hot yoga” bears little resemblance to the South Asian religious discipline from whence it originated. Thus, consumption activity can take on vastly different meanings in various local contexts (Kjeldgaard and Askegaard 2006).

A consumer culture, then, is a dynamic network of material, economic, symbolic, and social relationships or connections that functions both as an interpretive sense-making device and a cultural template for action (McCracken 1986). Regarding sense-making, consumer culture provides a system of meanings, values, ideals, and norms that influence consumers’ perceptions of what is desirable or undesirable and frames consumers expectations and understandings of the “good life.”

As a blueprint, consumer culture provides behavioral scripts and formal and informal rules that guide and organize action, motivating us to work in order to consume, to extol personal entrepreneurship, even to migrate in search of resources to satisfy consumer desires back home. Consumer culture provides templates for international tourism, for shopping in a mall, for posting on social media, and even when and what to give on the many gift giving occasions that punctuate each year and our life cycles.

Owing to the diversity and complexity of global flow of products, images, meanings, and information, consumer culture is not a unified system. Instead, it is heteroglossic. That means it incorporates a diverse and nested repertoire of meaning systems –personal, domestic, situational, national, and international. These systems are differentiated by social affiliations such as generational cohorts, gender, social class, caste, ethnicity, and so on, themselves expressed through distinctive patterns of consumption. Consumers draw on templates for action and sensemaking repertoires to guide their actions and give sense to what they do. Like a game where individuals improvise within the rules and the limits of their economic, social, and intellectual resources (Bourdieu 1984), consumer culture frames consumers’ horizons of conceivable action, feeling, and thought, making certain patterns of behavior and sense-making interpretations more likely than others and others unimaginable.

Key Findings & Insights

Over the past forty years consumer culture theorists have contributed insights to four main areas of understanding. The first is consumer identity work. This research offers an extended inquiry primarily into Western conceptions of identity, and the implications of these concepts for consumption. This research highlights the ways that identity can be an important source of meaning, stress, or anxiety for consumers, and how it is on this basis that companies and brands often seek to forge connections with them. The market reinforces a narrow sense of a dominant consumer identity but also has the power to represent and shift definitions of legitimate, normalized identities. Similarly, families draw on the market to produce a sense of shared identity through their consumption practices, experiences, and memories as well as how family should be performed. This research also provides a critical perspective on consumer identity work, casting doubt on the rational, agentic consumer depicted in much economic research. Instead, markets promote dominant consumer identities that align with widely accepted normative standards and cultural ideals and subordinate consumer identities that deviate from dominant norms and may be associated with stigmatized demographic or cultural characteristics. 

The second area of insight concerns marketplace cultures. Marketplace cultures refer to distinct systems of meanings, practices, values, and social relationships that are anchored by shared consumption interests. These collective groupings can form around a galvanizing brand, such as the brand communities that arose around the old East German Trabant automobile or the failed Apple Newton tablet, or a consumption activity such as surfing, running, or CrossFit, that become the focal point of consumption community, and which develops their own jargon, rituals, and status hierarchies. Consumer culture is crosscut with subcultures, tribes, communities, and publics.  Research shows that these forms of social life develop distinctive relationships to market offerings, and how in turn these relationships inevitably affect what marketers bring to the marketplace. Recent research rounds out these perspectives by exploring the importance of spirituality and religion in consumption. Not only have contemporary religious movements adopted some of the trappings of spectacular consumer culture, but consumers have elaborated new and renewed forms of spiritual practice such as pilgrimages, while making use of consumer goods and services.

The third stream of research deals with the socio-historic patterning of consumption. It focuses on the interrelationships between the capitalist market and gender, ethnicity, and class. It describes how these social categories, themselves produced by the distribution of resources through markets, pattern consumption; how consumers work to defend or transgress the boundaries between them; and how discrimination across categories is often expressed through consumption. However, this research stream also addresses how contemporary socio-political and cultural transformations, many of them linked to globalization, have undermined socio- cultural patterns and divisions giving rise both to new, and to more fluid social groupings. The research shows that every society makes use of socio-historically patterned categories to organize economic and social life. Culturally constructed beliefs and practices concerning them are often deeply ingrained. But researchers remind us that in consumer culture these categories are always in flux. Researchers discuss the ways in which consumption is implicated in the enactment, resistance to, and reformulation of socio-historical categories. In addition, research shows that globalization accelerates the movement of people, products, ideas, and images, not to mention money, which can dramatically upend local social structures, producing also more liquid relationships to consumer goods, services and experiences.

Finally, research on consumer cultures explains the role of ideology in shaping consumer behavior, and that, in turn, is shaped by consumers’ creative employment of commercial resources. Ideology refers to the cultural meanings which serve the interests of corporate capitalism and that help to maintain the socio-economic status quo. Research highlights that neither the social category nor the identity of the “consumer” is a natural and unchanging one. Rather, the consumer has emerged with the development and global expansion of the capitalist system and its ever-evolving socio-technical infrastructure.

Some research explores the topic of consumer resistance. Resistance means standing against a power, an influence, or attempts to act upon one’s conduct. Marketing practice and communications inculcates norms, prescribes behaviors, and conveys ideologies that consumers resist. Consumer resistance can be transformative, mobilizing for change in marketplace meanings, practices, and power relationships. Sometimes consumer resistance takes organized form in social movements that seek to transform aspects of consumer culture that are inequitable, exclusionary, or environmentally damaging. Groups marginalized, excluded or neglected via gender, race, ethnicity, religious background, cognitive abilities, or passion have organized to demand markets respond to their distinctive desires by transforming existing systems of consumption practices, modes of production, and market exchange, and in some cases by creating alternative markets.

Outlook

The scientific goal of cultural research on consumption is to develop a thorough understanding of consumption, as well as to critique consumer culture and its social impacts. In the future, this research program must build aggressively on recent studies that explore consumer cultures in the global South and throughout the world.

Consumer culture research can inform organizational strategy and social policy. Understanding consumer cultures can help organizations find “different alternative ways of viewing the world, as well as representing themselves and others” (Moisander et al. 2009, p. 333). It provides organizations with the tools to understand the significance of brands, objects, media, services, and market mediated experiences in consumers’ lives (Cayla and Arnould 2016). By understanding how consumption is used for identity construction and contestation, the performance of family, status signaling, community building, and relationship work, some organizations can better align their offerings with consumers’ goals and desires.

Consumer culture research can uncover shortcomings in public policy or provide support for changes in such policies. Insights from this research can influence strategy about sustainability, housing, and food insecurity in profit-oriented businesses, NGOs (non-governmental organizations), and among policymakers. For example, studies of eco-villages illustrate the opportunities and challenges consumers face in trying to craft lifestyles that diminish the role of market exchange in meeting consumers’ desires (Casey, et al. 2020).

Key References

Arnould, E. A. & Thompson, C. J. (2005). Consumer culture theory (CCT): Twenty years of research. Journal of Consumer Research, 31 (March), 868-882.

Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Cayla, J. & Arnould, E. (2013). Ethnographic Stories for Market Learning. Journal of Marketing, 77(July), 1-16.

Casey, K., Lichrou, M. & O’Malley, L. (2020). Prefiguring sustainable living: an ecovillage story. Journal of Marketing Management, 36(December), 1658-1679.

Kjeldgaard, D. & Askegaard, S. (2006). The glocalization of youth culture: the global youth segment as structures of common difference. Journal of Consumer Research, 33 (2), 231-247.

McCracken, G. (1986). Culture and consumption: a theoretical account of the structure and movement of the cultural meaning of consumer goods. Journal of Consumer Research, 13 (June), 71-84.

Moisander, J., Valtonen A. & Hirsto, H. (2009). Personal interviews in cultural consumer research – post‐structuralist challenges. Consumption Markets & Culture, 12 (4), 329-348.

Other References / Further Recommended Literature

Arnould. E.J. & Cayla, J. (2015). Consumer fetish: commercial ethnography and the sovereign consumer. Organization Studies, 36 (10), 1361-1386.

Arnould, E. J., & Price, L. L. (1993). River magic: extraordinary experience and the extended service encounter. Journal of Consumer Research, 20(1), 24-45.

Arnould, E. A., Thompson, C. J., Weiberger, M. & Crockett, D. (2023). Consumer Culture Theory, 2e. London: SAGE Publications.

Askegaard, S., & Eckhardt, G. M. (2012). Glocal yoga: Re-appropriation in the Indian consumptionscape. Marketing Theory, 12(1), 45-60.

Belk, R. W., Ger, G. & Askegaard, S. (2003). The fire of desire: a multisited inquiry into consumer passion. Journal of Consumer Research, 30(December), 326-351.

Higgins, L., & Hamilton, K. (2019). Therapeutic servicescapes and market-mediated performances of emotional suffering. Journal of Consumer Research, 45(6), 1230-1253.

Muñiz, A. M., Jr., & Schau, H. J. (2005). Religiosity in the abandoned Apple Newton abandoned brand community. Journal of Consumer Research, 31(4), 737-747.

Ritzer, G. & Jurgenson, N. (2010). Production, consumption, prosumption: the nature of capitalism in the age of the digital ‘prosumer’. Journal of Consumer Culture, 10 (1), 13-36. 

Sherry J. (1991). Postmodern alternatives: the interpretive turn in consumer research. In Handbook of Consumer Behavior; eds. Thomas Robertson and Harold Kassarjian, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 548-591. 

Skålén, P., Pace, S. & Cova, B. (2015). Firm-brand community value co-creation as alignment of practices. European Journal of Marketing, 49 (3/4), 596-620. 

Üstüner, T.& Holt, D.B. (2007). Dominated consumer acculturation: The social construction of poor migrant women’s consumer identity projects in a Turkish squatter. Journal of Consumer Research, 34 (1): 41–55.

Varman, R., Sreekumar, H., Belk, R. W. (2022). Money, sacrificial work, and poor consumers, Journal of Consumer Research. 49(December), 657-677.