WS34 – Consumers

Workshop presentation

The organisation of mass consumption on an international scale has placed consumers, especially those of the urban middle classes, before an abundance of competing products. Consumers are subject to constant pressure from marketing and advertising. The scale of investments made in marketing is enough to show the significance that manufacturing and distribution firms give to the final decision of consumers. The four major actors, which are the public authorities that regulate, the companies that manufacture, those that distribute and the consumers, form an interdependent system in which each of the actors constantly influences the three others. In the end, this play results simultaneously in lifestyles and consumption styles, the relationships within society, and the preservation or destruction of natural resources and ecosystems. Traditional economics assumes that consumers react only to prices and to the quality of product usage and are indifferent to what occurs beforehand on the manufacturing and distribution side, as well as indifferent to the ultimate consequences of the act of consumption. It is as citizens that they are supposed to make other decisions, relative to the society they don’t want. Yet advertising shows how much companies know how to exploit the symbolic aspects of consumption.

Faced with increasingly concentrated economic powers, the consumers in many countries are becoming aware of the power they represent and are trying, especially by grouping together, to take advantage of it. First, their action often had to do with the capacity to freely evaluate the real qualities of the products and services offered. But another current gradually appeared and took on force: that of « responsible consumption ». The act of purchase and consumption has considerable consequences on the other side of the planet, without consumers being able, with the information they are given, to know and evaluate them. This is why there is a growing demand for « traceability » of the entire manufacturing and distribution network. There are various terms to describe this movement, such as « fair trade » and « responsible consumption ». However, their impact is considerable in the long-term. Each person realises that his or her acts of purchase are so many daily voting ballots capable of influencing the choices of society well beyond national borders. The manufacturing and distribution firms, confronted from the 1980s with spirited campaigns to denounce their practices that even include calls for boycotting their products, are increasingly sensitive to « reputational risks ». Any event that sullies the reputation of the brand or that sows doubt about the social, environmental or health implications of its practices may have considerable consequences, and companies are taking them more and more seriously.

In Europe, mass consumption became a reality in the 1960s. In China, the rapid economic development has today given rise to a middle class of several hundred million people who now have access to the « consumption society » for the first time. The importance of economic exchanges between China and Europe makes it so that the pressure by European consumers on production methods in China and the pressure, in the near future, by Chinese consumers on production conditions in Europe or elsewhere in the world, are going to play a decisive role in the evolution of modes of production and consumption.

The exercise of responsibility by consumers will be a central topic of the workshop.