A consumer is a person or a group who intends to order, or use purchased goods, products, or services primarily for personal, social, family, household and similar needs, who is not directly related to entrepreneurial or business activities. The term most commonly refers to a person who purchases goods and services for personal use.
Denis Diderot was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer, best known for serving as co-founder, chief editor, and contributor to the Encyclopédie along with Jean le Rond d'Alembert. He was a prominent figure during the Age of Enlightenment.
Consumerism is a social and economic order in which the aspirations of many individuals include the acquisition of goods and services beyond those necessary for survival or traditional displays of status. It emerged in Western Europe before the Industrial Revolution and became widespread around 1900. In economics, consumerism refers to policies that emphasize consumption. It is the consideration that the free choice of consumers should strongly orient the choice by manufacturers of what is produced and how, and therefore orient the economic organization of a society. Consumerism has been criticized by both individuals who choose other ways of participating in the economy and environmentalists concerned about its impact on the planet. Experts often assert that consumerism has physical limits, such as growth imperative and overconsumption, which have larger impacts on the environment. This includes direct effects like overexploitation of natural resources or large amounts of waste from disposable goods and significant effects like climate change. Similarly, some research and criticism focuses on the sociological effects of consumerism, such as reinforcement of class barriers and creation of inequalities.
In sociology and in economics, the term conspicuous consumption describes and explains the consumer practice of buying and using goods of a higher quality, price, or in greater quantity than practical. In 1899, the sociologist Thorstein Veblen coined the term conspicuous consumption to explain the spending of money on and the acquiring of luxury commodities specifically as a public display of economic power—the income and the accumulated wealth—of the buyer. To the conspicuous consumer, the public display of discretionary income is an economic means of either attaining or of maintaining a given social status.
In economics, an inferior good is a good whose demand decreases when consumer income rises, unlike normal goods, for which the opposite is observed. Inferiority, in this sense, is an observable fact relating to affordability rather than a statement about the quality of the good. There are many examples of inferior goods, including cheap cars, public transit options, payday lending, and inexpensive food. The shift in consumer demand for an inferior good can be explained by two natural economic phenomena: the substitution effect and the income effect.
In social behavior, downshifting is a trend where individuals adopt simpler lives from what critics call the "rat race".
A Veblen good is a type of luxury good, named after American economist Thorstein Veblen, for which the demand increases as the price increases, in apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve. The higher prices of Veblen goods may make them desirable as a status symbol in the practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. A product may be a Veblen good because it is a positional good, something few others can own.
In economics and particularly in consumer choice theory, the substitution effect is one component of the effect of a change in the price of a good upon the amount of that good demanded by a consumer, the other being the income effect.
Keeping up with the Joneses is an idiom in many parts of the English-speaking world referring to the comparison to one's neighbor as a benchmark for social class or the accumulation of material goods. To fail to "keep up with the Joneses" is perceived as demonstrating socio-economic or cultural inferiority. The phrase was coined by a 1910s comic strip of the same name.
The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (1899), by Thorstein Veblen, is a treatise of economics and sociology, and a critique of conspicuous consumption as a function of social class and of consumerism, which are social activities derived from the social stratification of people and the division of labor; the social institutions of the feudal period that have continued to the modern era.
Economic materialism can be described as either a personal attitude that attaches importance to acquiring and consuming material goods or as a logistical analysis of how physical resources are shaped into consumable products.
The trickle-down effect is a model of product adoption in marketing that affects many consumer goods and services.
Juliet B. Schor is an American economist and Sociology Professor at Boston College. She has studied trends in working time, consumerism, the relationship between work and family, women's issues and economic inequality, and concerns about climate change in the environment. From 2010 to 2017, she studied the sharing economy under a large research project funded by the MacArthur Foundation. She is currently working on a project titled "The Algorithmic Workplace" with a grant from the National Science Foundation.
La Religieuse is an 18th-century French novel by Denis Diderot. Completed in about 1780, it was first published by Friedrich Melchior Grimm in 1792 in his Correspondance littéraire in Saxony, and subsequently in 1796 in France.
Joan Hume McCracken was an American dancer and actress who became famous for her role as Sylvie in the original 1943 production of Oklahoma! She also was noted for her performances in the Broadway shows Bloomer Girl (1944), Billion Dollar Baby (1945) and Dance Me a Song (1950), and the films Hollywood Canteen (1945) and Good News (1947).
Anti-consumerism is a sociopolitical ideology that is opposed to consumerism, the continual buying and consuming of material possessions. Anti-consumerism is concerned with the private actions of business corporations in pursuit of financial and economic goals at the expense of the public welfare, especially in matters of environmental protection, social stratification, and ethics in the governing of a society. In politics, anti-consumerism overlaps with environmental activism, anti-globalization, and animal-rights activism; moreover, a conceptual variation of anti-consumerism is post-consumerism, living in a material way that transcends consumerism.
Grant David McCracken is a Canadian anthropologist and author, known for his books about culture and commerce. He was the founder and director of the Institute for Contemporary Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum and was a member of Convergence Culture Consortium at MIT. He holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago. He coined the term the Diderot effect. He lives in Rowayton, Connecticut.
The lipstick effect is the theory that when facing an economic crisis consumers will be more willing to buy less costly luxury goods. Instead of buying expensive purses and fur coats, for example, people will buy expensive cosmetics, such as high-end brands of lipstick. The underlying assumption is that a certain portion of consumers will still buy luxury goods even during a bad economy. When consumer trust in the economy is dwindling, consumers will buy goods that have less impact on their available funds. Outside the cosmetics market, consumers might be tempted to purchase other high-end goods such as expensive beers, or smaller, less costly electronic gadgets.
d'Alembert's Dream is an ensemble of three philosophical dialogues authored by Denis Diderot in 1769, which first anonymously appeared in the Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique between August and November 1782, but was not published in its own right until 1830:
Chief Culture Officer (2009) is the eighth book by Canadian author and anthropologist Grant McCracken. The book looks at how modern business attempt to connect with culture. In the author's analysis he considers examples such as Dove's campaign for real beauty, and the I Love New York advertising campaign.
