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

Understanding the Modern Consumer CultureIn The Rise of Consumer Society in Britain, John Benson identifies consumer societies as those in which choice and credit are right away available, in which social value is defined in terms of acquire power and material possessions, and in which there is a zest, above all, for that which is new, modern, kindle and fashionable. For decades research on the history of consumerism had been winding the clock up to the 19th century as the starting point of a culture of breathing in that fits Bensons description. For societies like these to exist, there needed to be a dependable portion of the population with sufficient money to purchase goods beyond casual necessities there needed to be powerful productive forces to make enough goods available and allow for new strategies of marketing and selling there besides needed to be a tendency among people to start place social meanings and emotions in the acquisition of goods. Industrialization, th ese histories tell us, prepared the ground for a consumer culture to develop thanks to malleable markets, large production lines, develop of shopping, advertising, marketing, etc. In Consumer Culture and Modernity, Don Slater argues against a productivist mold 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 untimely 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 ontogeny led to a wide penetration of consumer goods into the lives and homes of more social classes. Towards the 18th century a growing consuming public bred a desire for the new and created new de valetds and new styles. Contemporary features of consumer culture existed in the early modern mind, but they were recognizable in different forms. Under the camo of commerce and trade, not production or consumption, the early modern man came to contact with a new ideology of free exchange, not all 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 fill in the notion of civil society, which itself is born to modernity. The ideal of autonomous individuals rationally engage their interests in a free market a notion so much cherished within consumer culture stands at the heart of the draw of modernity in the eighteenth century.