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 prize and credit are readily available, in which social value is delineate in terms of purchasing power and material possessions, and in which at that place is a desire, above all, for that which is new, modern, exciting and fashionable. For decades research on the history of consumerism had been knotty the clock up to the nineteenth century as the starting pourboire of a conclusion of consumption that fits Bensons description. For societies like these to exist, there infallible to be a fair portion of the population with enough bills to purchase goods beyond daily necessities there needed to be right productive forces to make enough goods available and allow for new strategies of merchandise and selling there also needed to be a leaning among people to start investing social meanings and emotions in the acquisition of goods. Indu strialization, these histories pick out us, prepared the ground for a consumer culture to develop thanks to waxy commercializes, large production lines, rise of shopping, advertising, marketing, etc. In Consumer Culture and Modernity, bear Slater argues against a productivist bias which misleads into believing that production is the engine and subject matter of modernization (p. 16). Through a brilliant overview of the literature of revisionist historians, he traces the ontogeny of consumer culture from the present day to the early modern period. A consumer revolution, with the characteristics Benson suggested, was rising as early as the sixteenth century. A new realism of goods deriving from colonial exploitation led to a wide incursion of consumer goods into the lives and homes of more social classes. Towards the eighteenth century a growing overpowering public bred a desire for the new and created new demands and new styles. modern-day features of consumer culture exis ted 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 political theory 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 specimen 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.