The conflict market: Polarizing consumer culture(s) in counter-democracy

Abstract

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.

PLANT VERSUS COW: Conflict Framing in the Ant/Agonistic Relegitimization of a Market

“…However, we uncovered an intricate use of frames that we argue constitute a framing strategy on the rise at the marketplace: conflict framing . Besides the overall alignment processes of frame amplification, frame bridging, frame extension and frame transformation, the specific process of highlighting the incoherency of dualistic frames in ideological conflict allows the institutional actor to remain in the same culture-cognitive sphere, use its symbolic and structural infrastructure and construct that new shared ‘reality’ of necessary conflict, from which they––at a conflict market (Ulver 2021)––can realize profits. This, we claim, contributes to conversations in literature integrating marketing and institutional theory in general, and to the market evolution literature in particular, in at least three distinct ways that we discuss below.…”

“…Yet, at a market thriving on the idea of political polarization (Ulver 2021), a burgeoning virtue of antagonistic activism encourages brands to portray their competitors as ideological enemies and the situation foremost as one of deep conflict regarding totality objectives. In that sense they ( and the industry at large) risk to “lose” the consumers and other actors at the market which would perhaps not be the case if competing with agonistic activism.…”

“…We fear the idea of personal change because we think that we have to sacrifice something, to give something up, but human beings at our best are so inventive and creative and ingenious and I think that when we use love and compassion as our guiding principles, we can create, develop and implement systems of change that are beneficial to all sentient beings and to the environment.In line with other food world celebrities making contemporary buzz out of nature and animal welfare, this Hollywood actor’s pop-public manifesto speech at the Oscars, narratively connects with several bodily violations identified in political and psychological discourse in contemporary society; insemination (violation of animal right to her own body), stealth of baby at birth (violation of attachment theoretical norms) and the stealth of milk (violation of animal right to her own body, and resource plundering). While, through bodily associations, delegitimizing the dairy industry on the levels of normative and culture-cognitive, as well as regulative (stealth and plundering), his speech also exalts a marketplace myth in the neogreen consumer ideoscape (Ulver 2021) where consumers run free across flourishing oat fields according to the “guiding principles” of “love”, “compassion,” “systems of change,” “sentient beings” and “the environment.” Body-related rhetoric used to delegitimize the dairy industry are also made by directors at Oatly:[Oatly] is about solving global challenges linked to climate change and public health. We need to fundamentally change the food systems and what we eat, the dietary factors, because we make ourselves and the planet sick.…”

“…The jingle is part of a market-produced campaign from the fast-growing oat drink brand Oatly, who have tried to mobilize an everyday consumer resistance against the dairy industry by questioning the milk consumption market’s combined dimensions of legitimacy––hence, its ontology as an institution (Scott 1995)––to ultimately transform the dairy industry into a plant-based industry with themselves as the leading “brand activist” (Koch 2020). We argue that this phenomenon is theoretically important in the larger societal context of a burgeoning conflict market (Ulver 2021), where climate-related reconfigurations of the macro-level economy are simultaneously called for and contested. As a result, the monetization of conflicts between market actors, or between market actors and political actors, make up the core of the business model.…”

“…By pin-pointing the empirical case of plant-based drinks versus dairy milk we aim to contribute primarily to the market evolution literature in the intersection of institutional theory and marketing (Giesler 2008; Humphreys 2010 a ,b; Van Leeuwen 2007; Slimane et al 2019; Valor, Lloveras, and Papaoikoonomou 2021), to market studies literature on markets for “alternatives” (Fuentes and Fuentes 2017), and to the burgeoning literature on the depoliticizing functioning of “ethical” marketing (Bradshaw and Zwick 2016; Carrington, Zwick, and Neville 2016; Cronin and Fitchett 2020; Giesler and Veresiu 2014; Ulver 2021). We do this primarily by offering insights on market actors’ balancing act when using affectively loaded rhetorical strategies, not to delegitimize consumer practices (e.g., Valor, Lloveras, and Papaoikoonomou 2021) but to delegitimize competing market actors’ industry practices, and to win over their consumers.…”