Many years of living in a hyperconsumerist culture have shaped the way we think and feel and speak. The global consumer culture runs deep—and extends far beyond retail. The notion of consumption has become so embedded in public thinking and speaking that even people in the fields of education and healthcare feel the need to adopt the term consumers in speaking about their constituents. We are not suggesting service providers shouldn’t take their users’ needs seriously, nor would we discourage them from applying some of the principles that shape commercial markets. However, we are questioning whether the mindset of modern consumerism is the right way forward for retail, let alone for vital social services.

In much of the developed world, we have been so deeply immersed in the consumer culture that the words and impulses behind it have become second nature: Now! More! Fast! Easy! New! Upgrade! Choice! Buy! And until recently, the underlying assumptions of hyperconsumerism have gone unchallenged. Among them: The quicker the gratification, the better. Buying is a pleasure, so buying more means getting more pleasure. More stuff is better than less. Buying new makes more sense and costs less than repairing old. There’s more where that came from.

The choice that required the least thought, the least effort was more often than not considered the right one. Consumption, to a large extent, was about making life easier, which too many of us equated with making life better. It turns out we were wrong. Writing in The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures in 1970, French social theorist and critic Jean Baudrillard said:

This society which claims to be—which regards itself as being—in constant progress towards the abolition of effort, the resolution of tension, greater ease of living and automation, is in fact a society of stress, tension, drug use, in which the overall balance sheet of satisfaction is increasingly in deficit, in which individual and collective equilibrium is being progressively compromised even as the technical conditions for its realization are being increasingly fulfilled.

Now, more and more of us in developed markets are coming to the same conclusion, pulling back from many of our assumptions about what gives us satisfaction, and paying more attention to how, why, and what we consume. Looking at the U.S. sample in Euro RSCG’s New Consumer survey:

o 80 percent (and 86 percent of leading-edge Prosumers) are shopping “more carefully and mindfully” than they used to
o 77 percent (87 percent of Prosumers) say they’re smarter shoppers than they were a few years ago
o 57 percent (70 percent of Prosumers) say it’s more important to them today to feel good about the companies with which they do business
o 48 percent (61 percent of Prosumers) are making an effort to buy fewer disposable goods

Above all, the essence of hyperconsumerism has been to consume without thinking. For a significant portion of the population of the United States and other developed markets, including the United Kingdom and France, mindless consumption has lost its appeal. This doesn’t mean people’s spending patterns will necessarily and immediately undergo dramatic change—although it does for some people—but it does mean we are moving in a direction that is leading us away from the hyperconsumerism of the past few decades.

The mindful consumption we are seeing is different from hyperconsumption in the same way that slow food is different from fast food. Many of the ingredients may look similar or may even be the same, but the ways they are combined and cooked, and the way they are served and eaten, could hardly be more different.

Image credit: Steve Rhodes@flickr.com

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| Tags: conscious consumption, culture, Euro RSCG, green, mindful consumption, New Consumer, Retail, Sustainability, waste
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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 14th, 2010 at 6:14 pm and is filed under Consumerism, Eco-Consciousness, Growing Up, New Consumer, Prosumers, Purposeful Pleasure, Responsibility, Rightsizing, Shopping, Sustainability, Uncategorized, Values. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.