There are some academic sources on dissolution . The International Centre for Anti-Consumption Research (ICAR) is a mine of information and one of the messages I took away from browsing it was that there are more ways discussed there on how to dissuade, protest, fight against the forces of consumption at the beginning of the consumption cycle, than there are attempts to stop the wasteful abuse of material goods toward the end of the cycle. Given the ubiquity of consumption in our planet and the need to achieve some workable level of sustainable consumption then more attention should be paid to changing the consumer’s habit of just dumping stuff after use to a more constructive and thoughtful utilisation of what we have consumed. We may never extinguish ‘the fire of desire ’ 21 but we might be able to transform it into something else.
That concludes this description of the consumption cycle . The cycle does not finish however and, both at the level of the psychology of the individual consumer and at a societal level we repeat purchase and hopefully change our habits eventually. It should also be pointed out that in reality several consumption cycles are occurring in individual consumption, household consumption and society is continuously accommodating to these individual practices. At the moment I am writing as part of main consumption cycle and soon will break off for an essential coffee break when I make a decision whether to stay and make it from ingredients in the kitchen or go out and have it prepared and presented by baristas in my local coffee bar.
There is another part of the consumption cycle which is too complex to be dealt with here but is an essential part of the cycle and that is the question of ownership and the ways in which once purchases are made or gifts received then they often appreciate in value and gradually become integrated in various different ways into the household and the individual who is the owner (see Chapter 10).
Summary so Far
So far I have introduced the concept of consumption by entering through an economic definition that focusses on the purchase and use of provisions such as goods, services, materials or energy. The possibility of public goods being available free to all was critically looked at as was the relationship between production and consumption where one slips into the other and become ‘prosumption ’. Consumer psychology will start with an individual person and I invented one in Guy—a guy carrying a black bag. Guy lives on our planet and that immediately foregrounded the idea of a cross-cultural dimension which can be investigated with either an emic or etic approach to research. Consumption has a long and important history worldwide and Guy and his bag will reappear in different parts of the world making choices involving goods that probably have more limited commodity chains trailing in their wake, although if Guy was European and wealthy and living some time ago she might be wearing silk from China that emerged in Italy from a network of trading centres.
The idea of consumption as a process introduces a third dimension and I developed the consumption cycle in some detail from the need to consume through the consummatory act of buying to important concerns about recycling . Although various manifestations of Guy in history and across the globe can be imagined and, although it is probably not possible to ever do this although one can have the vision of how it could be done, one could identify an immense historical and cross-cultural matrix, each one filled with a record of the different stages of the consumption cycle this member of the human race was participating in at that time in history. Why bother? Because it provides me with an opportunity to identify a time span that is beyond the quotidian timescale that frames many consumption cycles and is much less than historical time. That is—the consumer’s own lifespan and how he or she changes and develops from conception to death .
Let’s try out the various concepts to see if this vision will work. I’ll start with a fragment drawn from my own life as a consumer, with just a bit of dramatic license.
It’s Friday evening in the winter of 2017 in Devon, England and I have decided to cook the evening meal for my family. Curry is my specialty and I’m keen on doing it with authenticity. What’s this—fresh ginger and coriander? I get in the car and drive round (about a mile) to the local Asian grocer and they have fresh ginger in a box and bundles of coriander in another box on the street together with other vegetables. When I get home and read the recipe I find out that we need runner beans but that’s OK because we bought them from Tesco and they’re in the freezer…
I could go on but let’s see how this can be contextualised in a description of the dimensions and cycles of consumption . I have made several choices here. Each choice provides me with the opportunity of linking into value chains (where did that come from and how) and one route that is well-publicised by the media involves fresh vegetables travelling by air half way round the world when it is out of season in England thus contributing to global warming and then we have to consider the economic value that Kenyan farmers contribute and so on. Is my use of runner beans flown in from the nearest continent (let’s assume they are) environmentally sustainable? Should I be rewarded with a least a warm glow for patronising my local shop or does that use of the word patronise have another meaning as well? My consumption of media (Lewis, Lawrence, & Jones, 2003) is involved which might relate (eventually) to global warming, the human contribution and maybe President Trump. My choice to drive rather than walk is also linked in. Eating is a complex set of social rituals that involve people of all ages ranging from young children to much older people (see for example Cappellini, Marshall, & Parsons, 2016). ‘Curry’ can refer to a variety of events in British culture and is rooted in British history so if we repeated this description for the 1960s then probably I would be opening a small jar with ‘curry powder’ written on it rather than driving to my local Asian grocer.
So we have age or stage of development of the consumer , a complex product dimension that covers different kinds classification of goods and services that we are consuming and which will need more than one dimension to describe, some history as well and of course a product cycle which in this example would include me preparing to shop then buying , then exploring. Taking something out of the freezer evokes memories of another cycle of consumption called ‘the big shop’ when we went to our local supermarket on Sunday afternoon. And at each choice node we potentially plug into a tangled web of value chains . Simple choices lead us into a complex system of supplying and adding value.
Notes
1.See Wong (2013) for examples of how rich parents in Beijing are buying air purifiers and sending their children to schools where indoor physical education in specially constructed ‘fresh air domes’ is made available.
2.Guy cannot be gendered so suspend disbelief now. The generic term as in ‘hey guys’ is usually non-gendered.
3.Readers who are sensitive to privilege in others will cry out that not everyone has a house with rooms to call home and I agree completely. Consumption in all cultures also includes the consumption of the poor and homeless whether it is a bedsit in Burnley, Lancashire or a refugee camp in Calais, France or sleeping rough on the steps of theatres in the West End of London.
4.I suppose other ways of receiving goods and services like finding and stealing could also be considered. Much as I would like to explore the moral issues surrounding them, space precludes looking at these.
5.UK expression for ‘sneakers’ in the US.
6.In this section, unless stated otherwise I am referring to the UK situation and that includes any data cited.
7.Being a farm shop shopper or for more metro-oriented mavens, buying at Whole Foods Market or—for a different ambience—La Grande Epicerie de Paris.
8.Lidl is a German no-frills supermarket so offers value-for-money goods but with various brands that are different from the more conventional range found in Sainsbury and Tesco.
9.Farm shops are retail outlets for the produce of the farm—usually vegetables and other fresh produce. There is also a variety of delicatessen produce and wines and other goods depending on size of outlet, usually at premium prices. The p
erceived value of field to shopping basket distance for vegetables (an ethical issue) should then compensate for the higher price. The ‘warm glow’ of behaving ethically is the reward that makes up for the extra price you pay for deli stuff that costs much less at Lidl’s.
10.A quick search uncovered sites with names like ‘hoard-no-more-art-throwing-stuff-away’ and ‘how-to-de-crapify-your-home’.
11.Originally used to describe the practice in Auckland, NZ where the city council encourages house owners to leave any household artefacts that are not wanted on the kerb outside their house on a certain day and then allow members of the public to scavenge and then take the remaining stuff away as part of the usual inorganic waste collection.
12.A hybrid word blending together production and consumption. It can be found in discussions about digital consumption. See Ritzer & Jurgenson (2010).
13.Some of the examples here are drawn from personal experience!
14.For some reason the three Toy Story films came to mind with heroes Buzz Lightyear and Sheriff Woody. The theme of anthropomorphism, a transformation from inanimate to animate as an undercurrent in consumer research is discussed in this book (see section in Chapter 4 called “Brand Priming”).
15.Fashions change and this is engineered by taste gurus (watch the film The Devil wears Prada). Fashion forecasting is big business and it can work in both directions where street fashion trends or high-end celebrity style trickles down to the High Street shops.
16.I know of no academic work on the semantics of disposal but it’s surely not just a coincidence that the words used—rubbish, trash, junk, garbage—are also used to describe highly undesirable or disagreeable arguments and drugs
17.Meaning learning while focussed on something else, rather than being didactically taught.
18.I’m using single quotes as others have used similar clichés and so there is no need for an attribution of ideas or speech here.
19.One of the marks of a successful TV concept is diversification. ‘Going celebrity’ is one way and this extra mini-series adds value because we are interested in what sort of junk celebrities have and indeed what their homes are like so we are invited in via Sarah who searches for ‘tip bound trash’ and then transforms it, with a little help from her friends. Big Brother when introduced in the UK in 2000 had a Celebrity Big Brother version. For those interested in celebrity culture there is a journal called Celebrity Studies which was launched in 2010.
20.Occasionally the original person-at-the-tip will trouser the cash with a passing reference to a ‘family celebration’ but never in Celebrity Money for Nothing whose participants are certainly media-savvy and aware of their reputation in front of potential audiences.
21.An allusion to a paper by Belk, Ger, & Askegaard (2003).
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Consumer Psychology Page 4
