Consumer Fetish

Definition of the term

The magical fetish anthropologists describe is a unique object, produced in a particular situation and intended to produce a particular effect. Consumer fetish has two meanings.  One meaning refers to the objects that consumers fetishize. The other meaning refers to organizations’ treatment of consumers as fetishes. Common to these uses is the idea of singular, material objects that are animated, are not under human control, and which can ‘deflect the course of human traffic’ (Pels 1998, 95). Both are linked to the commodity, the primary fetish object of consumer culture.

Scholars argue that the fetish mediates incommensurate worlds (Ellen 1999; Pietz, 1985, 1987) whether between humans and a transcendent environment (Pels, 1998), between the sphere of market and morality (Meyer, 1999; Pietz, 1985, 1987), or between a person and the elusive object of erotic desire (Freud 1977/1927). According to Pietz’s (1985) genealogy of fetish, Portuguese traders used the word in early cross-cultural contexts to address the power and awe that certain objects exerted on colonized African populations. Such objects did not conform to the expected utilitarian expectations in commodity exchanges and challenged the Europeans rational calculations of value.

In parallel, Karl Marx (1976/1884) used the term to describe the alienating power of commodities on workers in industrial societies. According to Marx, the commodity masks its trajectory and the labour involved in its production. It appears to have intrinsic value supposedly revealed through market exchange in relation to all other commodities. The consequence is that workers cannot recognize themselves in the product of their own labour and are alienated from their own agency. However, Marx does not really deal in any detail with the use-value or meaning of consumer goods.

In the work of both Marx and Freud the idea of the fetish involves attributing properties to objects that they do not ‘really’ have and that should correctly be recognised as of human origin. Freud’s examination of the fetish as a desired substitute for a suitable sex object explores how ordinary things—a shoe, a stocking, an undergarment– become objects of fantastical desires. Drawing on both Marx and Freud, Baudrillard breaks with their analyses of fetishism as demonstrating a human relation with unreal objects, i.e., commodity and token. Instead, he argues that in consumer culture both object and meaning are reduced to signs. Value in consumer culture is realized through the exchange of sign values. Collections and their market power epitomize the conspicuous consumption and exchange of sign values (Dant 1996). To summarize, the key qualities of the consumer fetish. First, it concretizes an abstract concept. Second, the fetish is animated; it is agentic. Third, the fetish conflates the object with its abstract properties; they share a mnemonic relationship. Fourth, ambiguity of control refers to the blurring of agency between person and object. Fifth, each fetish is uniquely authentic, rather than a symbol it is taken to be the thing itself.

Key Findings & Insights

Fetishized consumer goods: brands and collections

“The fetishism of commodities…is the fascination…of the system of differences, the code of signs that the object or good represents” (Dant 1996, 505). At the same time, fetishized consumer goods are concretized, animated, and agentic. Thus, the woman’s handbag creates a subjectivity, marks life cycle transition, hides within crucial identity making tools, signals social status, and propels its owner from home to office; its lack is unimaginable (Rosenberg, et al 2020).

Fetishization as process depends upon magical thinking either contagious magic or imitative magic, or both. Original designer fashion with an indexical link to the designer or touted by stars, models, and influencers, partakes of both. Through contagion, the wearer imbibes the aura of designers themselves (Dion and Arnould 2011), and is empowered to be like the influencers, stars, and models who display such fashions. Imitative magic transforms the wearer of signature athletic shoes into an athlete like Ronaldo or Coco Gauff, or the player of a signature guitar into the iconic player themselves. Contagious magic empowers the iconic holy water consumers purchase at Lourdes (actually, you buy the bottle, the water is “free.”). In short, in consumer culture, iconic brands are very like fetishes. Like the commodity in general, the dual fantasy of the brand as fetish is that “commodities are created without human agency…and the purchase and use of the commodity will result in a magical transformation for the consumer” (Duncombe 2011, 373).

Consumer goods taking the form of collections meld Marxian and Freudian concepts of the fetish with that of Baudrillard. Collections generally mask the origin of the object as a commodity produced and sold in the market behind other sign values such as character (Balthazar 2016), patina (McCracken 1986) or authenticity (Fernandez and Lastovicka 2011), all signifying uniqueness. Through these attributes consumers identify a certain erotic charge or magical aura to the collected goods. This erotic charge singularizes the collected objects, and denies their utilitarian exchange value.

An important quality of fetishized consumer objects is their transformative power, sometimes mnemonic stimulating the creation of a valued past, sometimes indexically linking consumers to an imagined place and time, and sometimes linking consumers to an imagined self. These effects are however indeterminate. As Keane (2006: 201) has argued: “They form the grounds for subsequent modes of action whose limits, if any, are in principle unknowable.”

The stories that consumers tell about favored brands or collections whether linked to personal memory, to historical people, events or places, or to future oriented identity projects tend to the mythical. That is, these stories often reflect the various functions of consumer myth. Consumers can easily project themselves into archetypal roles in these stories, e.g., the hero, the rebel, the trickster, the temptress, etc., and feel that the object allows them take on some of those desired characteristics. Thus, through narrative brands act like fetishes; that is, these powerful magical objects permit consumers to internalize mythic qualities. For example, collectors of rock n’roll memorabilia, such as an autographed guitar report that they feel empowered by the object’s magical aura (Fernandez and Lastovicka 2011).

The Freudian fetish is not absent in consumer culture. Freud’s theory argued that fetishized objects provided male fetishists with external evidence of their own sexual virility threatened by castration anxiety, that is, physical disempowerment, loss of agency, or alienation. Women may consume fetish objects as well. Research shows fetish ware is agentic; it heightens internalized sensual awareness, thereby combating physical alienation. Worn publicly, fetish wear commands attention; it is empowering. Through fetish fashion, women may communicate their confidence and comfort with their own sexuality, and thus assume roles in mythic stories like Diana (the huntress, aka Wonder Woman), Xena (the lesbian warrior princess), Pandora, Lillith, or Judith (re Holofernes) (O’Donnell 1999).

In sum, “fetishes facilitate [consumers’] privately and publicly imagined, but emotionally vivid, imaginary fantasy self-transformations” (Fernandez and Lastovicka 2011, 292).

The Consumer as Fetish

Just as the sixteenth-century Portuguese feitiço was a device for making sense of exotic trading practices on the Guinea Coast of Africa (Pietz, 1985, 1987), so too, is consumer as fetish a sensemaking device. Following Latour’s (2010) discussion, we know that organizations mitigate uncertainty through practices that render uncertainty manageable. Market research focused on segmentation and targeting is one such practice. Research reveals four moments in the fetishization of consumers: (1) through the construction of target market persona, a widespread practice in market-oriented and design ethnography, fetishized persona become material embodiments of the target market; (2) the fetishized consumer persona becomes a boundary object that mediates between the organization and an imagined marketplace; (3) through story boarding AI generated imagery, and even physical mockups, the consumer-fetish is enlivened into a sensuous object; and finally, (4) once so materialized and codified, the consumer-fetish assumes an agentic role within the organization as it incentivizes employees to design market offerings and communications to control [sic] the consumer fetish’s interaction with the organization.

Images and avatars of consumers constitute a way of knowing about markets. The manufactured sensuous, material immediacy of consumer fetishes produces their power. Consumer fetishes make the target market appear as if it is objective and manageable. Just as the commodity fetish obscures its origins in human labor consumer fetishes obscure their discursive origins in market research (Latour 2010; Marx 1976/1884; Pels 1998).

Outlook

While the commodity is as Baudrillard argued an empty signifier. Fetishism fills it with content. Consumer activists often aim to de-fetishize the commodity in ways that rely on truthtelling. Their revelatory strategy aims to reveal the ‘real’ socio-political history that lies behind every commodity; the labor practices which produce it, and the resources expended in its production and consumption. This is the tactic adopted by Adbusters. The restorative strategy aims to restitute the real: to restore the imagined “natural-socio-connections between nature, people, and products” (Duncombe 2012, 361). This is the tactic enshrined in Buy Nothing Day. But activists misunderstand that a fetish is empowering; truth-telling is a weak weapon against the fetish.

The consumer is not the only fetish detectable in the corporate world. Techno-utopians (Kozinets 2008) imagine that ever-evolving technical gadgets (cryptocurrencies, algorithms, AI) will allow them to beat the market, predict and control customer behavior, or even solve the crises of the Anthropocene. When uncontested and allowed to exert agency, these gadgets become fetishes. Similarly, economic growth concretized in a variety of economic measures, e.g., ROI, CLV, GDP, or stock price are examples of factishes (Latour 2010), the mathematicised version of the fetish.  When the accuracy and sophistication of numeric calculation is valued more highly than the phenomenon, they are meant to describe, statistics become free-floating signifiers in Baudrillard’s sense. And when organizations or governments treat statistical measures as true and incontrovertible, they can achieve fetishlike, magical control over social problems.

Perhaps social science can deconstruct organizational fetishes through analyses of their construction, the assumptions, and interpretative discourses in which they are embedded, and the tactics of their display. However, in a post truth world, if activists wish to combat both the fetish in consumer culture and the consumer as fetish, what is needed is to leverage the feitiço in terms of its entymological origins as something imagined and uniquely made to suit a particular purpose. In short, activist research should search out new empowering mythic imaginaries.

Key References

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

Dant, T. (1996). Fetishism and the social value of objects. Sociological Review, 44(3), 495-516.

Fernandez, K. V. & Lastovicka, J. L. (2011). Making magic: fetishes in contemporary consumption. Journal of Consumer Research, 38(August), 278–99.

Rosenberg, L., Turunen, L. M., Järvelä, S-M. & Arnould, E. (2022). The handbag, Consumption Markets & Culture, 25(April), 187-194.

Other References

Balthazar, A. C. (2016). Old things with character:  the fetishization of objects in Margate, UK. Journal of Material Culture, 21(4), 448–464.

Carlon, D. M., Downs, A. A. & Wert-Gray, S. (2006). Statistics as fetishes: the case of financial performance measures and executive compensation. Organizational Research Methods, 9(October), 475-490.

Duncombe, S. (2012). It stands on its head: Commodity fetishism, consumer activism, and the strategic use of fantasy. Culture and Organization, 18(December), 359–375.

Ellen, R. (1988). Fetishism. Man, n.s., 23(June), 213-235.

Freud, S. (1977/1927). “Fetishism.” In On Sexuality, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books.

Keane, W. (2006). Subjects and objects: Introduction. In C. Tilley (Ed.), Handbook of Material Culture (pp.197–202). London: Sage.

Kozinets, R. V. (2008). Technology/ideology: how ideological fields influence consumers’ technology narratives. Journal of Consumer Research, 34(April), 865-881.

Latour, B. (2010). On the modern cult of the Factish gods (Trans. C. Porter & H. MacLean). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Marx, K. (1976/1884). Capital: A critique of political economy, Vol. 1 (Trans. B. Fowkes). London: Penguin.

Meyer, B. (1999). Commodities and the power of prayer: Pentecostal attitudes towards consumption in contemporary Ghana. In B. Meyer & P. Geschiere (Eds.), Globalization and identity: dialectics of flow and closure (pp. 151–176). Oxford: Blackwell.

O’Donnell, K. A. (1999). Good girls gone bad: the consumption of fetish fashion and the sexual empowerment of women, Advances in Consumer Research, 26, 184-189.

Pels, P. (1998). The spirit of matter: on fetish, rarity, fact and fancy. In P. Spyer (Ed.), Border fetishism: material objects in unstable spaces. (pp. 91–121). London: Routledge.

Pietz, W. (1985). The problem of the fetish, I. Res; 9, 5-17.

Pietz, W. (1987). The problem of the fetish, II: the origin of the fetish. Res; 13, 23-45.