Political ideologies of the far-right are gaining ground in world politics and culture, not least by way of market forces. It has therefore become urgent to understand how these ideologies manifest themselves in the fields of marketing and consumption at a sociocultural level. The authors explore the discursive efforts in far-right consumer resistance to advance a political agenda through protests directed at brands’ multicultural advertising and analyze how these consumers conceptualize their adversaries in the marketplace. In contrast to previous framings of adversaries identified in consumer research, where resistance is typically anticapitalist and directed toward firms’ unethical conduct or the exploitation by the global market economy per se, the authors find that the following discursive themes stand out in the far-right consumer resistance: the emphasis on the state as main antagonist, the indifference to capitalism as a potential adversary, and overt contestation of liberal ethics. The article concludes with a discussion of research contributions as well as the public policy and marketing implications in light of a growing far-right consumer culture.
How does dull turn into cool? Every now and then new markets emerge and consumption that used to be mundane and insignificant transforms into something socially significant. Using the theoretical lens of cultural system transformation, this research set out to analyze how consumers, through their identity work, unintentionally transform a market by negotiating its symbolic boundaries and expanding its borders in relation to their social surroundings. The results showed that consumer identity work contributes to forming the market by providing it with new symbolic meanings (epistemic, entertainment and erotic), by extending it with new discursive and material content (through epistemic refinement), and by expanding it through the provision (active and unintentional promotion of the consumption field to confirm their own identity) of new consumers. This research added to at least three ongoing conversations in marketing research; (i) to the macromarketing research stream on marketing systems by taking a cultural system perspective and recognizing the subtle but transformative impact of symbolic consumer meanings and identity work, (ii) to the consumer culture theory (CCT) research stream on market formation by highlighting consumers’ unintentional change of a market through intense identity struggle in their immediate social circle, and (iii) to both above streams by highlighting what makes identity struggle distinct at a mundane rather than more controversial or extraordinary market.
Purpose – The purpose of this article is to argue that consumers experience conflict not only when in identity transitions or social status transitions but also in-between these two, and that the relationship between these two is becoming increasingly important to address. First, this is done by identifying how status transitions (vertical movements) overlap but differ in some important respects from identity transitions (horizontal movements), and second, the consumption strategies used by people when these movements lead to an experience of conflict between one’s (new/old) identity role and (new/old) status position have been demonstrated. Design/methodology/approach – In this multi-sited, qualitative data collection, the phenomenological and ethnographic interviews have been conducted with 35 urban middle-class consumers in their homes at three culturally and historically different sites (Sweden, Turkey and the USA). Findings – The importance and kind of a consumption strategy to resolve the status–identity incongruence relates if it is mainly a vertically or horizontally determined transition. To consumers with a main focus on status change – characterised by hierarchical and competitive dimensions that identity role transitions are free from – the engagement in consumption becomes more important and intense. Practical implications – Marketers have historically mainly been engaged in static categorisation and segmentation of consumer lifestyles. By instead emphasising consumers’ life transitions and their accompanying status–identity conflicts, marketers may consider the implications for market communication. Social implications – Given that liquid modernity (Bauman, 2001) and its loose social structures forces the middle-class to become increasingly socially mobile, matches and mismatches between identity and status positions ought to become more common and the resulting consumption strategies more sophisticated. This research offers a first, tentative framework for understanding these conflicts in relation to consumption. Originality/value – Although lifestyle transitions have often been elaborated on in consumer research, the differences between social status transitions and identity transitions, and especially the conflict in-between these two, have not been paid its deserved attention. Based on multi-sited, qualitative data collection, concrete consumption strategies following the experience of status–identity incongruence have been identified. The results also contribute to a better understanding of the growing uncertainty and volatility of social status positions in contemporary middle-class consumer culture.
At the beginning of the millennium, consumer culture researchers predicted that people would increasingly demand that marketplace actors subscribe to contemporary ethics of liberal democracy. Although their prediction indeed came true, they did not foresee that an algorithm-powered media ecosystem in combination with growing authoritarian movements would soon come to fuel an increasingly polarized political landscape and challenge the very fundament of liberal democracy per se. In this macroscopic, conceptual article, I discuss three assumption-challenging logics—counter-democratic consumer culture, de-dialectical algorithmic manipulation, and growing illiberal consumer resistance—according to which the market increasingly monetizes the conflicts accompanying this polarization and, thereby, reinforces it. I call this new logic a conflict market and illustrate it through three, historically situated and currently conflicting, consumer ideoscapes—the neoblue, the neogreen, and the neobrown—between which consumers engage in marketized conflicts, not in a de-politicizing way, but in an increasingly un-politicizing, de-dialectical, and polarizing way. At the technologically manipulated conflict market, the role of marketers is to monetize politically sensitive topics by creating conflict, knowingly renouncing large groups of consumers, and giving fodder to the political extremes.
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