This book will serve scholars of consumer society, history, sociology, political economy, and economics. It will appeal to a wide array of readers interested in modern Canadian history, debates about the rise of consumer society, Canadian thought and culture, and intellectual history.

Consumer culture influences virtually all activities within modern societies and has become an important area of study for businesses. Logical analysis of consumer behavior is difficult as humans have different reasons for repeatedly buying products they need or want, and it is challenging to follow why they buy unneeded or unwanted products regularly. Without a comprehensive understanding of consumer culture as the basis, market discussions become empty and produce little insight into the power consumers hold in affecting other individuals and society. Multifaceted Explorations of Consumer Culture and Its Impact on Individuals and Society provides emerging research from different perspectives on the basis and ramifications of consumer culture, as well as how it affects all aspects of the lives of individuals. While providing a platform for exploring interpersonal interactions and issues related to ethics in marketing, readers will gain valuable insight into areas such as consumer vs. producer mentality, the effects of consumerism on developing countries, and the consequences of consumerism. This book is an important resource for marketing professionals, business managers, sociologists, students, academicians, researchers, and consumer professionals.

Consumer culture influences virtually all activities within modern societies and has become an important area of study for businesses. Logical analysis of consumer behavior is difficult as humans have different reasons for repeatedly buying products they need or want, and it is challenging to follow why they buy unneeded or unwanted products regularly. Without a comprehensive understanding of consumer culture as the basis, market discussions become empty and produce little insight into the power consumers hold in affecting other individuals and society. Multifaceted Explorations of Consumer Culture and Its Impact on Individuals and Society provides emerging research from different perspectives on the basis and ramifications of consumer culture, as well as how it affects all aspects of the lives of individuals. While providing a platform for exploring interpersonal interactions and issues related to ethics in marketing, readers will gain valuable insight into areas such as consumer vs. producer mentality, the effects of consumerism on developing countries, and the consequences of consumerism. This book is an important resource for marketing professionals, business managers, sociologists, students, academicians, researchers, and consumer professionals.

Consumer engagement is becoming crucial to the recall and survival of brands in intense competitive markets. Due to digital innovations, businesses have seen the emergence of the millennial population as a target audience, and many businesses are struggling with adopting methods to engage the generation to leverage an enriched brand experience. Optimizing Millennial Consumer Engagement With Mood Analysis is a critical scholarly resource that explores how companies ensure brand sustainability through influencing the minds and moods of consumers to create an interactive customer experience. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such product presentation, brand fandom, social media, lifestyle products, and buying behavior, this book is geared towards marketers, business managers, business practitioners, international business strategists, academicians, consumer researchers, and upper-level graduate students attempting to understand consumer engagement through mood analysis.

Debates around the concept of authenticity date to the earliest theories of tourism, as scholars attempted to understand motivations for traveling away from 'home' and touristic experiences of places far 'away'. Over time, theories of authenticity have burgeoned from epistemological to ontological notions drawing a broad range of philosophers into tourism research. This edited volume features chapters that engage with key debates about authenticity - its materiality, how it is perceived, and how it is experienced. The book is comprised of four sections thematically organized around popular trends in authenticity research in tourism, making this volume appropriate as both a comprehensive text and as individual investigations. Authenticity & Tourism: Materialities, Perceptions, Experiences includes chapters that engage with the pragmatic and the theoretical, including conversations on marketing and the production of tourism attractions, examinations of the constructive nature of authenticity, and the politics of authentication processes. Also included are contributions that revisit technological trends in tourism and advance debates of authenticity in souvenirs, photographs, and simulated experiences, as well as those more firmly anchored in the theoretical, pushing boundaries and establishing paths for future research. Across these chapters, the authors employ a range of methodologies, from autoethnography to photo and food-elicitation combinations to discourse and content analyses. Set against a backdrop of truly global case studies, this collection exemplifies the multiple facets of authenticity research in tourism.

Evaluating the ways in which we construe consumer choice, this book examines the psychology, methods and realities of the role it plays for today's consumer. Confronted by competing brands and products, services, and e-tailed opportunities that are but a click away, how does the consumer choose among them to achieve the particular array of goods to suit their lifestyle? Consumer researchers often seek to explain consumer choice by attributing it to beliefs, desires, attitudes, and intentions in the absence of any theoretical justification. Perspectives on Consumer Choice is the outcome of a research program that employs cognitive explanations in a responsible and disciplined way to genuinely elucidate consumer choice in social scientific terms. Employing a reasoned approach to understanding consumption, this book builds upon theoretical and empirical research in economic psychology, behavioral economics and philosophy as well as marketing and consumer research.

Consumer engagement is becoming crucial to the recall and survival of brands in intense competitive markets. Due to digital innovations, businesses have seen the emergence of the millennial population as a target audience, and many businesses are struggling with adopting methods to engage the generation to leverage an enriched brand experience. Optimizing Millennial Consumer Engagement With Mood Analysis is a critical scholarly resource that explores how companies ensure brand sustainability through influencing the minds and moods of consumers to create an interactive customer experience. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such product presentation, brand fandom, social media, lifestyle products, and buying behavior, this book is geared towards marketers, business managers, business practitioners, international business strategists, academicians, consumer researchers, and upper-level graduate students attempting to understand consumer engagement through mood analysis.

"Coke adds life. Just do it. Yo quiero Taco Bell." We live in a commercial age, awash in a sea of brand names, logos, and advertising jingles -- not to mention commodities themselves. Are shoppers merely the unwitting stooges of the greedy producers who will stop at nothing to sell their wares? Are the producers' powers of persuasion so great that resistance is futile?

James Twitchell counters this assumption of the used and abused consumer with a witty and unflinching look at commercial culture, starting from the simple observation that "we are powerfully attracted to the world of goods (after all, we don't call them 'bads')." He contends that far from being forced upon us against our better judgment, "consumerism is our better judgment." Why? Because increasingly, store-bought objects are what hold us together as a society, doing the work of "birth, patina, pews, coats of arms, house, and social rank" -- previously done by religion and bloodline. We immediately understand the connotations of status and identity exemplified by the Nike swoosh, the Polo pony, the Guess? label, the DKNY logo. The commodity alone is not what we are after; rather, we actively and creatively want that logo and its signification -- the social identity it bestows upon us. As Twitchell summarizes, "Tell me what you buy, and I will tell what you are and who you want to be."

Using elements as disparate as the film "The Jerk, " French theorists, popular bumper stickers, and "Money" magazine to explore the nature and importance of advertising lingo, packaging, fashion, and "The Meaning of Self," Twitchell overturns one stodgy social myth after another. In the process he reveals the purchase and possession of things to be the self-identifying acts of modern life. Not only does the car you drive tell others who you are, it lets you know as well. The consumption of goods, according to Twitchell, provides us with tangible everyday comforts and with crucial inner security in a seemingly faithless age. That we may find our sense of self through buying material objects is among the chief indictments of contemporary culture. Twitchell, however, sees the significance of shopping. "There are no false needs." We buy more than objects, we buy meaning. For many of us, especially in our youth, Things R Us.

This book will serve scholars of consumer society, history, sociology, political economy, and economics. It will appeal to a wide array of readers interested in modern Canadian history, debates about the rise of consumer society, Canadian thought and culture, and intellectual history.

Mass Media, Consumerism and National Identity in Postwar Japan addresses Japan's evolving nationalism and national identity in relation to its newly rising consumerism during the two decades from 1952 to 1972, through a study of the transformation of the print media and the market for weekly and monthly magazines. Martyn Smith argues that the transformation of the print media in the 1950s and 1960s expanded the possibilities for social, individual and national identities in Japan. From the late 1950s, the growth in the market for weekly magazines was fuelled by the huge potential for advertising revenue, the rapid development of the Japanese economy, and the necessity for the growth of a consumer society. This resulted in the merging of national identity with individual subjectivity - which this book describes as 'national subjectivity' - as the Japanese media promoted individual consumption to aid the recovery of the Japanese nation as a whole. Examining housewife magazines such as Fujin Koron, Fujin no Tomo and Fujin Gaho, as well as news magazines such as Mainichi Graph and Asahi Graph, and publications aimed at young people - Shukan Heibon and Heibon Punch - Smith shows how the relationship of nationalism to everyday life is best understood by taking into account the changing nature of consumption in the period. By presenting an alternative to the traditional 'top-down' narrative of state-driven economic nationalism, this book therefore makes a unique contribution to the study of postwar Japanese history and Japanese nationalism.

Economic development in Asia is associated with expanding urbanism, overconsumption, and a steep growth in living standards. At the same time, rapid urbanisation, changing class consciousness, and a new rural-urban divide in the region have led to fundamental shifts in the way ecological concerns are articulated politically and culturally. Moreover, these changes are often viewed through a Western moralistic lens, which at the same time applauds Asia's economic growth as the welcome reviver of a floundering world economy and simultaneously condemns this growth as encouraging hyperconsumerism and a rupture with more natural ways of living. This book presents an analysis of a range of practices and activities from across Asia that demonstrate that people in Asia are alert to ecological concerns, that they are taking action to implement new styles of green living, and that Asia offers interesting alternatives to narrow Anglo-American models of sustainable living. Subjects explored include eco-tourism in the Philippines, green co-operatives in Korea, the importance of "tradition" within Asian discourses of sustainability, and much more.

Digital Food Activism is a new edited volume that investigates how digital media technologies are transforming food activism and consumers' engagements with food, eating, and food systems. Bringing together critical food studies, economic anthropology, digital sociology, and science and technology studies, Digital Food Activism offers innovative multi-disciplinary analyses of food activist practices on social media, mobile apps, and hybrid online and offline alternative spaces. With chapters that focus on diverse digital platforms, food-related issues, and geographic locales, this volume reveals how platforms, programmers, and consumers are becoming key mediators of the mandate of food corporations and official governing actors. Digital Food Activism thereby suggests that emerging forms of activism in the digital era hold the potential to reshape the ethics, aesthetics, and patterns of food consumption.

Across Asia, consumer culture is increasingly shaping everyday life, with neoliberal economic and social policies increasingly adopted by governments who see their citizens as individualised, sovereign consumers with choices about their lifestyles and identities. One aspect of this development has been the emergence of new wealthy middle classes with lifestyle aspirations shaped by national, regional and global media - especially by a range of new popular lifestyle media, which includes magazines, television and mobile and social media. This book explores how far everyday conceptions and experiences of identity are being transformed by media cultures across the region. It considers a range of different media in different Asian contexts, contrasting how the shaping of lifestyles in Asia differs from similar processes in Western countries, and assessing how the new lifestyle media represents not just a new emergent media culture, but also illustrates wider cultural and social changes in the Asian region.

In the decades following World War II, the creation and expansion of massive domestic markets and relatively stable economies allowed for mass consumption on an unprecedented scale, giving rise to the consumer society that exists today. Many avant-garde artists explored the nexus between consumption and aesthetics, questioning how consumerism affects how we perceive the world, place ourselves in it, and make sense of it via perception and emotion. Delirious Consumption focuses on the two largest cultural economies in Latin America, Mexico and Brazil, and analyzes how their artists and writers both embraced and resisted the spirit of development and progress that defines the consumer moment in late capitalism. Sergio Delgado Moya looks specifically at the work of David Alfaro Siqueiros, the Brazilian concrete poets, Octavio Paz, and Lygia Clark to determine how each of them arrived at forms of aesthetic production balanced between high modernism and consumer culture. He finds in their works a provocative positioning vis-a-vis urban commodity capitalism, an ambivalent position that takes an assured but flexible stance against commodification, alienation, and the politics of domination and inequality that defines market economies. In Delgado Moya's view, these poets and artists appeal to uselessness, nonutility, and noncommunication-all markers of the aesthetic-while drawing on the terms proper to a world of consumption and consumer culture.

Antisemitic stereotypes of Jews as capitalists have hindered research into the economic dimension of the Jewish past. The figure of the Jew as trader and financier dominated the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But the economy has been central to Jewish life and the Jewish image in the world; Jews not only made money but spent money. This book is the first to investigate the intersection between consumption, identity, and Jewish history in Europe. It aims to examine the role and place of consumption within Jewish society and the ways consumerism generated and reinforced Jewish notions of belonging from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the new millennium. It shows how the advances of modernization and secularization in the modern period increased the importance of consumption in Jewish life, making it a significant factor in the process of redefining Jewish identity.

This first book-length treatment of the life and work of Christine Frederick (1883-1970) reveals an important dilemma that faced educated women of the early twentieth century. Contrary to her professional role as home efficiency expert, advertising consultant, and consumer advocate, Christine Frederick espoused the nineteenth-century ideal of preserving the virtuous home--and a woman's place in it. In an effort to reconcile her desire to succeed in the public sphere of modernization and consumerism with the knowledge that most middle-class Americans still held traditional beliefs about gender roles, Frederick fashioned a career for herself that encouraged other women to remain at home. With the rise of home economics and scientific management, Frederick--college-educated but confined to the drudgery of housework--devised a plan for bringing the public sphere into the domestic. Her home would become her factory. She learned how to standardize tasks by observing labor-saving devices in industry and then applied this knowledge to housework. She standardized dishwashing, for example, by breaking the job into three separate operations: scraping and stacking, washing, and drying and putting away. Determined to train women to become proficient homemakers and efficient managers, Frederick secured a job writing articles for the Ladies' Home Journal. A professional career as home efficiency expert later expanded to include advertising consultant and consumer advocate. Frederick assured male advertisers that she knew women well and promised to help them sell to ""Mrs. Consumer."" While Frederick sought the power and influence available only to men, she promoted a division of labor by gender and therefore served the fall of the early-twentieth-century wave of feminism. Rutherford's engaging account of Christine Frederick's life reflects a dilemma that continues to affect women today--whether to seek professional gratification or adhere to traditional family values.

Exploring the ambiguous relationship between fandom and consumer culture, this book provides a critical overview of fans, fan cultures and fan experiences in relation to the broader experience and transformation economy. Fans and Fan Cultures discusses key theoretical concepts concerning celebrity, fandoms, subculture, consumerism and marketing through a range of examples in film, travel and tourism, football and music. With an emphasis on social media, and how various online platforms are utilised by brands, artists and fans, the authors explore how this type of communication often contributes to trivialising authentic expressions of cultural and social values and identities.

To gain the most competitive edge, marketers must continually optimize their promotional strategies. While the adult population is a prominent target, there is significant market potential for young consumers as well. Analyzing Children's Consumption Behavior: Ethics, Methodologies, and Future Considerations presents a dynamic overview of the best practices for marketing products that target children as consumers and analyzes the most effective promotional strategies being utilized. Highlighting both the advantages and challenges of targeting young consumers, this book is a pivotal reference source for marketers, professionals, researchers, upper-level students, and practitioners interested in emerging perspectives on children's consumption behavior.

Julia Weindel provides novel implications for researchers and managers by first identifying the sector-specific main levers of retail brand equity. Second, she shows that retail brand equity and perceived value have a reciprocal relationship. The author analyzes which one of these has stronger effects on loyalty. Third, she addresses the interdependencies between brand beliefs, retail brand equity, and loyalty within multichannel retail structures. The study is forced through the knowledge that management of retail brands is highly valuable for scholars and managers, because retail brand equity is known to strongly influence consumer behavior in various contexts. The retail brand represents a valuable asset for retailers which need to know the levers of retail brand equity.

From food products to fashions and cosmetics to children's toys, a wide range of commodities today are being marketed as "halal" (permitted, lawful) or "Islamic" to Muslim consumers both in the West and in Muslim-majority nations. However, many of these products are not authentically Islamic or halal, and their producers have not necessarily created them to honor religious practice or sentiment. Instead, most "halal" commodities are profit-driven, and they exploit the rise of a new Islamic economic paradigm, "Brand Islam," as a clever marketing tool. Brand Islam investigates the rise of this highly lucrative marketing strategy and the resulting growth in consumer loyalty to goods and services identified as Islamic. Faegheh Shirazi explores the reasons why consumers buy Islam-branded products, including conspicuous piety or a longing to identify with a larger Muslim community, especially for those Muslims who live in Western countries, and how this phenomenon is affecting the religious, cultural, and economic lives of Muslim consumers. She demonstrates that Brand Islam has actually enabled a new type of global networking, joining product and service sectors together in a huge conglomerate that some are referring to as the Interland. A timely and original contribution to Muslim cultural studies, Brand Islam reveals how and why the growth of consumerism, global communications, and the Westernization of many Islamic countries are all driving the commercialization of Islam.

Digital media present opportunities for new types of consumption including desiring, buying, collecting, making, and even selling digital virtual goods. To these activities we can add those taking place in virtual communities of consumption, online shops, brand websites, and online auction houses that together amount to a vast new landscape of consumption. Digital virtual consumption motivates concatenated practices which produce meaningful experience for their users as well as market opportunities to profit from them. Consumers create and maintain elaborate wish lists, engaging with simulations of brands on websites and in videogames, coveting items for use in online games and even spending 'real' money on these, undertaking entrepreneurial activity in virtual worlds, conjuring nostalgia via online auctions, engaging in playful consumption in other new retail formats, writing reviews of products as part of the consumption experience, engaging in online activist activities, and many other emerging behaviors. Analyses of consumption in the digital virtual realm are however limited. This collection brings together experienced researchers from the fields of consumer research, digital games, and virtual worlds to provide conceptual and empirical work that helps us understand these new and significant consumer activities. Online communities negotiate the 'correct' use of goods and offer technical advice, consumers develop new products, individuals create and distribute their own promotional material for their favorite brands, and entrepreneurial consumers marketing and selling their own products online. Here we may see a blurring of consumption and production, or work and leisure activity that requires further thought about what makes it meaningful for individuals. The chapters in this volume take stock of the emergence and likely importance of digital virtual consumption for consumer culture, including a review of both new and existing conceptual and methodological tools as well as a resource of key examples and analyses of practices.

What does it mean to live a good life in a time when the planet is overheating, the human population continues to steadily reach new peaks, oceans are turning more acidic, and fertile soils the world over are eroding at unprecedented rates? These and other simultaneous harms and threats demand creative responses at several levels of consideration and action. Written by an international team of contributors, this book examines in-depth the relationship between sustainability and the good life. Drawing on wealth of theories, from social practice theory to architecture and design theory, and disciplines, such as anthropology and environmental philosophy, this volume promotes participatory action-research based approaches to encourage sustainability and wellbeing at local levels. It covers topical issues such the politics of prosperity, globalization, and indigenous notions of "the good life" and happiness". Finally it places a strong emphasis on food at the heart of the sustainability and good life debate, for instance binding the global south to the north through import and exports, or linking everyday lives to ideals within the dream of the good life, with cookbooks and shows. This interdisciplinary book provides invaluable insights for researchers and postgraduate students interested in the contribution of the environmental humanities to the sustainability debate.

Having a grasp on what appeals to consumers and how consumers are making purchasing decisions is essential to the success of any organization that thrives by offering a product or service. Despite the importance of consumer knowledge and understanding, research-based insight into the buying patterns and consumption habits of individuals in emerging nations remains limited. The Handbook of Research on Consumerism and Buying Behavior in Developing Nations takes a critical look at the often overlooked opportunities available for driving consumer demand and interest in developing countries. Emphasizing the power of the consumer market in emerging economies and their overall role in the global market system, this edited volume features research-based perspectives on consumer perception, behavior, and relationship management across industries. This timely publication is an essential resource for marketing professionals, consumer researchers, international business strategists, scholars, and graduate-level students.

Sports are not what they used to be. New publicly funded stadiums resemble shopping malls. Fans compete for cash prizes in fantasy sports leagues. Sports video games are now marketing and public relations tools and team logos have become fashionable brands. The larger social meanings sports hold for fans are being eclipsed by their commercial function as a means to sell merchandise and connect corporate sponsors with consumers. This book examines how the American consumer culture affects professional and collegiate sports, reducing fans to consumers and trivializing sports themselves.