Modern American culture promotes excessive consumption through widespread advertising. Advertising dominates media and shapes social standards to encourage wasteful consumption as the norm. While consumption levels were once reserved for the wealthy, advertising teaches people in developed nations to consume far more resources than necessary at the expense of global equality and environmental sustainability. Critics argue that overconsumption stems from advertising promoting materialism, inadequacy, and competition over meaningless purchases rather than meaningful experiences and relationships. Movements now resist ubiquitous marketing and promote simpler, less wasteful lifestyles.

1. A culture based on consumption

2. Consumption culture
• David Potter has called modern American
advertising the “institution of abundance”
• He states, “It dominates the media, it has
vast power in the shaping of popular
standards, and it is really one of the very
limited group of institutions which exercise
social control.”

3. Americans and the consumption
of natural resources
• US residents consume at a level
unprecedented in human history
– Living at a level reserved for the rich in the past
– Mass prosperity
– Huge levels of waste

4. • The United Nations Development
Programme’s (UNDP) Human Development
Report 1998 (HDR 1998) provides some of
the most striking statistics:
• The ratios of consumption levels of 20
percent of the people who live in the richest
countries to the 20 percent who live in the
poorest countries are:
• Eleven times for meat,
• Seventeen times for energy,
• Seven times for fish,
• Forty-nine times for telephone lines,
• One hundred forty five times for cars, and
• Sixteen times in the overall.

6. What are the outcomes?
• Huge waste
– Garbage
– Pollution
– Resource depletion
– Domestic unrest
– International conflict
– Happiness? (high standard of living)
– Worldly population
– Investment in consumables rather than capital

7. Features of materialism
• Desire to own things that does not reflect actual
need (wants)
• Dissatisfaction with one’s current material
conditions
• Jealousy toward those with greater levels of
material wealth
• Willingness to exchange non-material values for
material values
• Evaluation of others based on their material
wealth

8. Where does materialism come
from?
• Nature?
– Is it natural to want more than you need?
• Nurture?
– If so, what in the culture leads to a materialist
attitude?

9. Themes of advertising
• You are inadequate
– Products exist to make you better
• You will be admired for owning something
• Commodities can make you happy
– They solve your problems
– They make up for your inadequacies
• Consumption is a competition
– Whoever has the most stuff when he dies, wins

10. Export of consumption ideology
• Countries that are receiving Western media
images and advertising experience an
increase in wasteful consumption
• “Revolution of rising expectations”
– Even in poor countries, the population expects
greater levels of consumer goods, lifestyle
improvement
• May contribute to “Third World instability”

11. Center for Sustainable Production and
Consumption,1999)
• Advertising, though not targeted as such, does
influence the very poor (the destitutes) to forsake
some of their basic needs and buy/choose
commodities not required immediately.
In villages across India we can find TV sets that run
on generators (as there is no regular electricity
supply) but no such arrangement that village
children may read or write in the evenings. Even the
very poor of the villages get to see (and enjoy) the
programmes and the advertisements on these TV sets
and make slow changes in their consumption patterns.

15. Stuart Ewen
• The development of manufacturing capacity in
excess of native want created a demand for a force
that would teach people to consume—to use up
the excess capacity.
• Advertising was developed to provide that
education
• Consumption levels that were reserved for the rich
were now expanding to include the middle class.
– Fashion industry
– Planned obsolescence
– Manufactured wants

16. Consumer socialization
• Children are taught how to consume at a
very early age
– Advertising to young children
– In-school advertising
– Peer evaluation based on physical appearance,
branded clothes, etc.
– Parents’ emphasis on material goods

20. Schudson
• We have always wanted to consume at high
levels, but economic scarcity has frustrated
us

21. How does commercial communication
lead to consumption ethic?
• Takes real problems and proposes profit-based
solutions to them
– Headache: Best solution, lie down till it goes away
(though migraine may be another matter)
• Turns natural conditions into a problem
– Human smells, wrinkles
• Makes individual feel inadequate, proposes a
solution based on a purchase
[Excessive narcissism]
– Skin not perfect
– Eyebrow hair continues over nose
– Figure
– Hair

28. Stay Free! (no author, date)
• What these explanations miss, however, is that the
forces behind ambient are inherent in the
advertising process. Advertising works somewhat
like bacteria: After its hosts (consumers) are
exposed, they become immune, so new strains of
ads must develop and grow. These new strains are
quickly copied, adding clutter, requiring new
strains to emerge. Over time, advertising clutter
leads to diminishing returns for individual
campaigns. The more advertising grows, the more
it must grow. The cycle accelerates and what was
formerly considered unethical, offensive, or
gauche is gradually mainstreamed out of
necessity.

29. The invasion of the sacred
by the profane
• Even sacred parts of our culture and our lives have
been ‘colonized’ by the marketing imperative
– Jesus jeans
– The use of sacred symbols in advertising
– Marketing in the schools
– Marketing strategy for political campaigns
– Marketing strategy for fundraising for good works
– The commercialization of art
• Painting
• Music
• Cinema
• Stage

35. Pre-packaged personalities
• Cues for individual behavior drawn from
communications aimed at selling
– Image advertising
– Image-conscious consumers
• Cultural promotion of image-consciousness
– “You are what you wear”
• Transfer of brand image to brand wearer/purchaser
– Transformation of consumption experience
according to brand image

36. • Is there a loss of authentic, meaningful life?
– Communication and expression that are not tied
to commerce?
– Individual meaning and expression that has
nothing to do with conspicuous consumption?
• The things people say they want may not be
things we can purchase.
– Is it true that “Money can’t buy happiness”?

45. Resistance
• “The consumption ethic” has become an
area of concern in relatively recent times
• AdBusters, Cultural Environment
Movement
• Actions taken:
– Buy Nothing Day
– Culture jamming
– Boycotts, etc.

52. • “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t
know what you’ve got till it’s gone?”
• Rarely does social action predate disaster.
– Need to hope for “small disaster”