Children are significant consumers of services such as health, welfare, educational institutions and the environment. Alongside this, the marketization of childhood means that children are exposed to advertising and marketing through a wide range of media on a daily basis. Examining key debates on children's power, status and citizenship issues, it considers the wider implications of how consumerism impacts on children's health, well-being and life chances. This timely book explores childhood and consumerism through four key strands: children as consumers of services; children as consumers of space; the link between citizenship and consumption; the influences of the marketization of childhood. Rethinking Children as Consumers will be essential reading for students, researchers, practitioners and policy makers who are interested in the topic of consumerism across early childhood, childhood, youth and society.

* Why do people behave and think the way they do? * What makes people choose certain products and services? * How does consumption affect our everyday lives? Informed by psychological theory and supported by research, Consumer Psychology provides an overview to understanding consumer behaviour and underlying thought processes. Written in a clear and accessible style it is an essential read for students of consumer psychology. It is also important reading for anyone studying consumption, whether in marketing, consumer behaviour, sociology, anthropology, business studies, cyber psychology or sustainability. Psychology is central to an effective understanding of consumer behaviour and this book shows how it can be used to explain why people choose certain products and services, and how this affects their behaviour and psychological well-being. This book explores key theories from a broad range of psychology disciplines to show how psychology can help explain consumption behaviours. These include: * Memory and learning * Perception and attention * Emotions * Decision making * Motivation * Happiness This 2nd second edition has been updated with new research throughout and has more in-depth sections on topics such as: * Motives for and consequences of sharing in a social media environment * Online gaming and online customized advertising * Sustainable consumption and how to increase it Each chapter features an introduction, key terms, summary and study questions or class exercises that encourage you to think critically about the topics covered. Real-life examples including adverts and case studies are included throughout to ensure clear application to everyday life.

While scholarly works on this topic have to date mainly concentrated on Japan's influences in economic and political terms, this volume examines Japanese influences in Asia from a broader perspective. The text takes into account human factors, such as the presence of Japanese people as workers, managers and visitors in Asian societies and the flow of Japanese goods in terms on their impact on popular culture. In addition, the book examines the feelings within other Asian nations such as India and Malaysia to the Japanese presence, looking at Japanese the people's aspirations, expectations and at times disappointments. Written by Asian and Western scholars from variety of academic perspectives, the essays in this volume analyze the topic at both macro- and micro-levels. They examine the variegated and highly differing influences and presences of Japan as seen from a number of view points, from street perspectives and the world of popular culture, to global political issues, to questions of regional investment and the cultural and economic aspirations of Chinese students in Japan.

This book provides a comprehensive examination of the effects of a natural disaster on businesses and organisations, and on a range of stakeholders, including employees and consumers. Research on how communities and businesses respond to disasters can inform policy and mitigate the cost and impacts of future disasters. This book discusses how places recover following a disaster and the vital roles that business and other organisations play. This volume gives a detailed understanding of business, organisational and consumer responses to the Christchurch earthquake sequence of 2010-2011, which caused 185 deaths, the loss of over 70 per cent of buildings in the city's CBD, major infrastructure damage, and severely affected the city's image. Despite the devastation, the businesses, organisations and people of Christchurch are now undergoing significant recovery. The book sheds significant new light not only on business and organisation response to disaster but on how business and urban systems may be made more resilient.

The book explores the vital role played by the financial service industries in enabling the poor to consume over the last hundred and fifty years. Spending requires means, but these industries offered something else as well - they offered practical marketing devices that captured, captivated and enticed poor consumers. Consumption and consumer markets depend on such devices but their role has been poorly understood both in the social sciences and in business studies and marketing. While the analysis of consumption and markets has been carved up between academics and practitioners who have been interested in either their social and cultural life or their economic and commercial organisation, consumption continues to be driven by their combination. Devising consumption requires practical mixtures of commerce and art whether the product is an insurance policy or the next gadget in the internet of things . By making the case for a pragmatic understanding of how ordinary, everyday consumption is orchestrated, the book offers an alternative to orthodox approaches, which should appeal to interdisciplinary audiences interested in questions about how markets work and why it matters.

Death has never been more visible to consumers. From life insurance to burial plots to estate planning, we are constantly reminded of consumer choices to be made with our mortality in mind. Religious beliefs in the afterlife (or their absence) impact everyday consumption activities. Death in a Consumer Culture presents the broadest array of research on the topic of death and consumer behaviour across disciplinary boundaries. Organised into five sections covering: The Death Industry; Death Rituals; Death and Consumption; Death and the Body; and Alternate Endings, the book explores topics from celebrity death tourism, pet and online memorialization; family history research, to alternatives to traditional corpse disposal methods and patient-assisted suicide. Work from scholars in history, religious studies, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and cultural studies sits alongside research in marketing and consumer culture. From eastern and western perspectives, spanning social groups and demographic categories, all explore the ubiquity of death as a physical, emotional, cultural, social, and cosmological inevitability. Offering a richly unique anthology on this challenging topic, this book will be of interest to researchers working at the intersections of consumer culture, marketing and mortality.

In Retail and Social Change Steven Miles, presents a cross-disciplinary analysis of the evolution of retail and how in both its material and virtual guises it has come to reframe our relationship with the social world. Retail has become increasingly influential in homogenising the urban experience. And yet in reacting to trends in virtual consumption retailers are also becoming more and more conscious of the need to engage with consumers in more sophisticated ways. Retail and Social Change will interest students and scholars in geography, cultural studies, sociology, marketing and business studies interested in how and why retail pervades both our physical and emotional lives in increasingly unexpected ways. It will provide a lively, comparative and thought-provoking contribution that interrogates the implications of retail change, for what it means to be a citizen of a consumer society in the twenty-first century.

How do people communicate their romantic feelings? Gift giving is one way. Giving and receiving of gifts is a characteristic of intimate relationships. Gifts are a message, a form of communication with a tangible material object, about love, affection, or concern for the recipient. The "romantic gift" evokes a multitude of intertwined meanings: passion, intimacy, affection, persuasion, care, celebration, altruism, and nostalgia. They can also connote the negative images of obligation and reciprocity. Romantic gift giving may be practiced at rituals, during rites of passage, or for casual occasions, to affirm the continued importance of the romantic relationship. We may even romanticize the giving of gifts to the self, to nonhuman companions, and to others we do not know personally. If loving and giving are a practice, then romantic gift giving is a practice of loving with intimate-or would-be intimate-others. This book addresses gift giving among consumers attempting to express and construct romantic love. It lies at the intersection of consumption, markets, and culture. In societies shaped by the globalizing neo-liberal economic order, increasing wealth disparity, and a partially digitized social environment that they help to co-construct, it may be time to rethink romantic love. Gift giving is a key arena to do so, as gifts make love tangible and act as carriers of meaning as well as cultural symbols. In gift giving the meanings of romance are renewed, renegotiated, and reconstructed. Gifts, Romance, And Consumer Culture demonstrates a wide variety of scholarly work bearing on romantic gift giving using an interpretive consumer research perspective. The book introduces critical studies by scholars in this unfolding and new interdisciplinary field.

This book explores contemporary families as sites of consumption, examining the changing contexts of family life, where new forms of family are altering how family life is practised and produced, and addressing key social issues - childhood obesity, alchohol and drug addiction, social networking, viral marketing - that put pressure on families as the social, economic and regulatory environments of consumption change.

As corporate activity continues to expand in line with the continued globalization of the economy there is an increasing demand for establishing rules to regulate the trans-boundary activities of firms and their many and complex relations with consumers. Until now, sources of knowledge in this field have been scattered and unsystematic and this volume fills a key gap in current literature, providing a concise and accessible introduction to the role of global consumer organizations. The book: Provides an historical overview that traces the early attempts made before WWII to formulate elements of global consumer policy, highlighting key issues and initiatives up until the 1980s. Outlines the groups of organizations that are responsible for dealing with consumer issues in areas such as trade and development, socio-economics and the environment, including the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, and World Bank. Analyses the group of special intergovernmental organizations that address the problems of specific consumer segments, industries and service-providers, including the World Health Organization, International Telecommunication Union and World Tourism Organization. Evaluates both current and future challenges and dilemmas facing consumer organizations, including addressing the continued issues of coordination between them. Providing a much-needed overview of this key area in international organization, Global Consumer Organizations will be of interest to students and scholars in a range of areas, including international political economy, consumer behaviour, international organizations, economic policy and consumer behaviour.

This book, first published in 1996, presents a collection of papers by Gordon Foxall charting the development of the Behavioural Perspective Model (BPM) which he devised in the early 1980s and subsequently developed. The model offers a unique and original behaviour-based theory of consumer choice. In seeking to answer the question 'where does consumer choice take place?' by drawing upon behavioural psychology, Foxall presents an exciting challenge to previous theories whose emphasis has been on the internal working of the consumer's mind in reaching rational decisions and choices. Bringing alive the important subject of economic consumption, this seminal volume will be of great interest to students and researchers in consumer research.

As corporate activity continues to expand in line with the continued globalization of the economy there is an increasing demand for establishing rules to regulate the trans-boundary activities of firms and their many and complex relations with consumers. Until now, sources of knowledge in this field have been scattered and unsystematic and this volume fills a key gap in current literature, providing a concise and accessible introduction to the role of global consumer organizations. The book: Provides an historical overview that traces the early attempts made before WWII to formulate elements of global consumer policy, highlighting key issues and initiatives up until the 1980s. Outlines the groups of organizations that are responsible for dealing with consumer issues in areas such as trade and development, socio-economics and the environment, including the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, and World Bank. Analyses the group of special intergovernmental organizations that address the problems of specific consumer segments, industries and service-providers, including the World Health Organization, International Telecommunication Union and World Tourism Organization. Evaluates both current and future challenges and dilemmas facing consumer organizations, including addressing the continued issues of coordination between them. Providing a much-needed overview of this key area in international organization, Global Consumer Organizations will be of interest to students and scholars in a range of areas, including international political economy, consumer behaviour, international organizations, economic policy and consumer behaviour.

After decades of turmoil and trauma, the Brezhnev era brought stability and an unprecedented rise in living standards to the Soviet Union, enabling ordinary people to enjoy modern consumer goods on an entirely new scale. This book analyses the politics and economics of the state's efforts to improve living standards, and shows how mass consumption was often used as an instrument of legitimacy, ideology and modernization. However, the resulting consumer revolution brought its own problems for the socialist regime. Rising well-being and the resulting ethos of consumption altered citizens' relationship with the state and had profound consequences for the communist project. The book uses a wealth of sources to explore the challenge that consumer modernity was posing to Soviet 'mature socialism' between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s. It combines analysis of economic policy and public debates on consumerism with the stories of ordinary people and their attitudes to fashion, Western goods and the home. The book contests the notion that Soviet consumers were merely passive, abused, eternally queuing victims and that the Brezhnev era was a period of 'stagnation', arguing instead that personal consumption provided the incentive and the space for individuals to connect and interact with society and the regime even before perestroika. This book offers a lively account of Soviet society and everyday life during a period which is rapidly becoming a new frontier of historical research.

Consumer vulnerability is of growing importance as a research topic for those exploring wellbeing. This book provides space to critically engage with the conditions, contexts and characteristics of consumer vulnerability, which affect how people experience and respond to the marketplace and vice versa. Focussing on substantive, ethical, social and methodological issues, this book brings together key researchers in the field and practitioners who work with vulnerability on a daily basis. Organised into 4 sections, it considers consumer vulnerability and key life stages, health and wellbeing, poverty, and exclusion. Methodologically the chapters draw on qualitative research, employing a variety of methods from interview, to the use of poetry, film and other cultural artefacts. This book will be of interest to marketing and consumer research scholars and students and also to researchers in other disciplines including sociology, public policy and anthropology, and practitioners, policy makers and charitable organisations working with vulnerable groups.

Global Cities, Local Streets: Everyday Diversity from New York to Shanghai, a cutting-edge text/ethnography, reports on the rapidly expanding field of global, urban studies through a unique pairing of six teams of urban researchers from around the world. The authors present shopping streets from each city - New York, Shanghai, Amsterdam, Berlin, Toronto, and Tokyo - how they have changed over the years, and how they illustrate globalization embedded in local communities. This is an ideal addition to courses in urbanization, consumption, and globalization.. The book's companion website, www.globalcitieslocalstreets.org, has additional videos, images, and maps, alongside a forum where students and instructors can post their own shopping street experiences.

This book offers a new perspective on sociological studies of the consumer society, introducing neglected normative questions relating to the good life and human flourishing - subjects more commonly discussed in fields of moral, political, and social philosophy. With attention to a wide range of subjects, including postemotional law and responsibility, dehumanised consumption and prosumerism, fashion, embodiment, conspicuous consumption, and sustainability, this book analyzes the structural and cultural transformations that can be identified in consumer society. It also offers a critical - but not pessimistic - view of the important question of whether consumption is leading to an increasing isolation, individualization or commodification of human beings, suggesting an analytical framework for understanding consumer culture and human praxis. Bringing together work from across disciplines by scholars in the US, Europe, and the UK to engage with questions concerning our globalized and globalizing world, where consumerism is a keystone for understanding our contemporary culture and its social structures, Being Human in a Consumer Society will appeal to scholars and students of sociology, social theory, and contemporary philosophy.

There is now a widespread interest in reuse in many domains, from opera houses built over old warehouses, to vintage clothes and everyday goods incorporating repurposed materials or parts. Despite its ubiquity, this extensive creative work is typically seen in narrowly environmental terms, as a means of reducing carbon, resource use or waste. However, as this volume shows, reuse also has aesthetic and cultural dimensions and a rich social currency, invoked to consciously subvert the accelerated consumer culture responsible for our unfolding environmental crisis. In three parts, the essays in this book consider reuse in terms of values, aesthetics and meaning, its application in contemporary urban and spatial settings, and the revival of social practices involving a more conscious recourse to reuse and repair. These are bookended by the editors' essays: the first, on the significant relationship between reuse and technological and social acceleration evident in the surrounding consumer society; and the last, on the multiple forms of reuse deployed in a contemporary alternative building practice, and their contributions to presenting alternative ways of living in the world. Challenging dominant understandings of 'waste' and 'consumption', Subverting Consumerism shows how reuse has become a means for many to creatively engage with the past, and to discover a continuity and sense of place eroded by the accelerative regimes of contemporary consumerism. Becoming a means of resistance, and offering a range of aesthetic, social and economic possibilities, reuse can be found to subvert and challenge the obsessive quest for the new found in contemporary consumerism.

With growing awareness of environmental deterioration, atmospheric pollution and resource depletion, the last several decades have brought increased attention and scrutiny to global consumption levels. However, there are significant and well documented limitations associated with current efforts to encourage more sustainable consumption patterns, ranging from informational and time constraints to the highly individualizing effect of market-based participation. This volume, featuring essays solicited from experts engaged in sustainable consumption research from around the world, presents empirical and theoretical illustrations of the various means through which politics and power influence (un)sustainable consumption practices, policies and perspectives. With chapters on compelling topics including collective action, behaviour-change and the transition movement, the authors discuss why current efforts have largely failed to meet environmental targets and explore promising directions for research, policy and practice. Featuring contributions that will help the reader open up politics and power in ways that are accessible and productive and bridge the gaps with current approaches to sustainable consumption, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of sustainable consumption and the politics of sustainability.

A good deal of consumer research is focused on social influence, since consumers make purchase decisions in the context of a social framework. This collection of innovative essays examines both the conscious and non-conscious effects of social influence on consumer behavior processes and outcomes, covering a wide variety of topics such as compliance, influence tactics, social networks, social relationships, family decision-making, and spokespersons. The papers are authored by experts in consumer psychology from both psychology and marketing backgrounds. Some of their key insights include: The relationship between the target and the influence agent determines the effectiveness of influence tactics Priming consumers with products associated with social networks, such as iPhones for friends or refrigerators with families, makes those products become more attractive Negative associations of celebrity endorsers can transfer to the brand Cognitive dissonance underlies the question-behavior effect Family decision-making includes emotional contagion and mirroring Post-decisional information search is often conducted even when the search may reveal that a bad decision was made The fear-then-relief technique can lead to purchase. The papers in this volume offer a rich assortment of research ideas which will prove valuable in furthering theoretical development in the social influence-consumer behavior area. This book will be of interest to consumer researchers and psychologists engaged in active empirical or conceptual work. It was originally published as a special issue of the journal Social Influence.

The book explores the vital role played by the financial service industries in enabling the poor to consume over the last hundred and fifty years. Spending requires means, but these industries offered something else as well they offered practical marketing devices that captured, captivated and enticed poor consumers. Consumption and consumer markets depend on such devices but their role has been poorly understood both in the social sciences and in business studies and marketing. While the analysis of consumption and markets has been carved up between academics and practitioners who have been interested in either their social and cultural life or their economic and commercial organization, consumption continues to be driven by their combination. Devising consumption requires practical mixtures of commerce and art whether the product is an insurance policy or the latest release IPad. By advancing the case for a more pragmatic understanding of how ordinary, dull, everyday consumption is arranged, the book offers an alternative to orthodox approaches, which will appeal to broader interdisciplinary audiences interested in questions about how, and why, consumer markets work.

This book analyzes the factors behind the recent expansion of Fairtrade and questions whether the trust given to the scheme by "ethical" shoppers is warranted. It goes about this assessment by analyzing the claim of ethical shopping and by scrutinizing the specific contribution of the Fairtrade Certification Mark to producer s welfare. This assessment is based on information gathered in a mixture of desk-based research and fieldwork carried out in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Peru, Tanzania and South Africa. This book comprises separate chapters written by academics of various backgrounds, who have worked together on Fairtrade, it should however be noted that the authors do not necessarily hold a common set of views in respect to Fairtrade."

The Active Consumer discusses how consumers seem to delight in trying new solutions and exploring new combinatory possibilities. This book provides an economic-theoretical understanding of this phenomenon and the many ways in which innovation can structure consumer choice. The authors show from different points of view how central novelty can be in consumer behaviour, how it relates to technical change and how new consumer capabilities are developed and organized.

After decades of turmoil and trauma, the Brezhnev era brought stability and an unprecedented rise in living standards to the Soviet Union, enabling ordinary people to enjoy modern consumer goods on an entirely new scale. This book analyses the politics and economics of the state's efforts to improve living standards, and shows how mass consumption was often used as an instrument of legitimacy, ideology and modernization. However, the resulting consumer revolution brought its own problems for the socialist regime. Rising well-being and the resulting ethos of consumption altered citizens' relationship with the state and had profound consequences for the communist project. The book uses a wealth of sources to explore the challenge that consumer modernity was posing to Soviet 'mature socialism' between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s. It combines analysis of economic policy and public debates on consumerism with the stories of ordinary people and their attitudes to fashion, Western goods and the home. The book contests the notion that Soviet consumers were merely passive, abused, eternally queuing victims and that the Brezhnev era was a period of 'stagnation', arguing instead that personal consumption provided the incentive and the space for individuals to connect and interact with society and the regime even before perestroika. This book offers a lively account of Soviet society and everyday life during a period which is rapidly becoming a new frontier of historical research.

Anti-consumerism has become a conspicuous part of contemporary activism and popular culture, from 'culture jams' and actions against Esso and Starbucks, through the downshifting and voluntary simplicity movements, the rise of ethical consumption and organic and the high profile of films and books like Supersize Me! and No Logo. A rising awareness of labor conditions in overseas plants, the environmental impact of intensified consumer lifestyles and the effects of neo-liberal privatization have all stimulated such popular cultural opposition. However, the subject of anti-consumerism has received relatively little theoretical attention - particularly from cultural studies, which is surprising given the discipline's historical investments in extending radical politics and exploring the complexities of consumer desire. This book considers how the expanding resources of contemporary cultural theory might be drawn upon to understand anti-consumerist identifications and practices; how railing against the social and cultural effects of consumerism has a complex past as well as present; and it pays attention to the interplays between the different movements of anti-consumerism and the particular modes of consumer culture in which they exist. In addition, as well as 'using' cultural studies to analyse anti-consumerism, it also asks how such anti-consumerist practices and discourse challenges some of the presumptions and positions currently held in cultural studies. This book was previously published as a special issue of Cultural Studies.

Product placement is now an integral part of what is considered the highest-quality fiction programming on television. Throughout the history of television, until now, direct product placement within fiction has not been a significant marketing strategy. This broadcasting/marketing configuration marks a another definitive step in the history of the commercialization of television. This book is an exploration of the interconnections between media economics and communication discourse. The recessionary, highly competitive economic environment of the 1980s, which affected networks, independent broadcasting, and the media industry in general, has been widely noted in the business pages of the national press. But the dramatic effects on programming wrought by the financial strategies of this period are yet to be understood. Marketing factors account for the heightened emphasis on programming environment during the 1980s. But what are the full implications of the practice of audience marketing and the creation of appropriate programming environments?