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Underground > Art, Fashion & Design >

Unwritten rules, especially in consumer culture

10:32 / 17.03.04

Hi! Im new to this, doing my honours on the above subject, and need as much subjective input as I can find - basically, I think being anti- consumerist is silly, but making people aware of their choices is vital ! (if anyone saw those Puma Blowjob ads, that's kind of what I'm getting at). Know any unwritten rules, especially to do with being a consumer? Please help!

10:51 / 17.03.04

what sort of un written rules? something along the lines of '*Never* wear white socks unless you are playing a sport'?

11:15 / 17.03.04

A friend of mine who once worked for *spits* The Daily Mail turned up for work wearing brown loafers and was told by the newsdesk: "Never brown in town, dear boy".

13:07 / 17.03.04

"Consumer culture" is pretty broad, are you looking at advertising (which aspect of it)? Or like a "Consumer Reports" product review type of thing?

13:20 / 17.03.04

If you're interested, there's a thread about the Puma ads here... when you say that's kind of what I'm getting at, do you mean that they're creating an image which people will either 'agree' or 'disagree' with, and that it's forcing them to decide whether or not they buy into it? Or am I on the wrong track entirely?

17:48 / 17.03.04

check out Rick Poynors book Obey the Giant. Great articles of the nature of visual communication in the modern corporate reality

07:11 / 25.03.04

Thanks for the book tip. Very useful.
My main concern is basically to adress the fact that people forget that they have choice, and that they don't have to choose coca cola, just because ads tell them to. its kind of ironic, im creating objects that will be interactive graphics ( eg: publications, 3D designs) that will make young people realise the difference between being a consumer and being an EDUCATED consumer.

: )

( my topic: How to investigate the unwritten rules within consumer youth culture through the use of graphic design)

08:59 / 25.03.04

What do you mean by 'educated consumer'? And how do you educate a consumer?

Children and teenagers are influenced mostly by advertising and other means of brand projection, and while they may choose one brand over another it's mostly a combination of personal preference, product availability and (to a more limited degree than previously believed) peer pressure. These days, the main aim of advertising aimed the youth culture seems to be to enhance the awareness of the existence of the brand, and attempting to connect the brand to certain 'lifestyle' trends (health, sport, music, etc).

My main concern is basically to adress the fact that people forget that they have choice, and that they don't have to choose coca cola, just because ads tell them to.

...well, yes and no. In terms of products such as coca cola, you often find that the distribution network controls your choice. My university has a distribution deal with Coke, so you're unlikely to find Pepsi products. Also, don't forget that consumers are inherently lazy in terms of their brand choices. Most people keep buying their brands because that's what they've always bought.

I don't believe people forget they have a choice. Children as young as 5 are aware that different brands exist for the same type of product, and are able to justify their preference for one particular one. The issue would be better described as people knowing they have a choice, but not acting upon it for some reason (laziness, comfort, cost, quality perceptions, etc).

Tryphena Absent

11:05 / 25.03.04

My main concern is basically to adress the fact that people forget that they have choice

I think it's very important to talk with regards to categories... the choice of Coke or Pepsi for example can rest on a number of things- you might choose one because it's the brand your mother bought and never drink the other so I assume what you're trying to do is remind people that there are myriad brands to pick from and that you might actually prefer the taste of another brand that you never consider buying. With regards to clothes other things come up, the consumer culture outside the home comes in to play for kids at a very young age where clothes are concerned. My brother always wanted to wear Nikes but my mum always bought him cheaper trainers. When he was 14 and a skater he wore DCs. The unwritten rule is that the clothes accompany the sub-culture that you inhabit so if I was a different girl I might want to wear Miss Sixty or Lipsy but in reality I'm actually pretty happy with cheaper high street clothing (and have a desire to spend my money on Yoshimoto and Agnes B). Money then is the other unwritten rule where branding is concerned because a large number of us can't afford the things that we might want to buy and shops like H&M and Topshop play on this by producing catwalk copies a little behind the designers.

11:29 / 25.03.04

... But with regards to Coke - IS there choice anymore? Not in a 'oh, they are all the same' sense - on a basic level of availability - Coke has the wearwithal to ensure its barnd is available *everywhere* and often carries much of the burden of risk for selling its product - ie coke will provide vending machines and service those machine in return for access to a market such as a college refectory...

Tryphena Absent

11:54 / 25.03.04

Well let's say you go to Sainsbury's, you have a choice of coke, Dr. Pepper, Pepsi or their own brand. There may be more, I wouldn't know because I detest the stuff.

12:01 / 25.03.04

But my point is (and it still holds even in sainsbury's although to a lesser extend) that its not just brand awarness that decides what consumers choose - the economic power of the company behind the brand exercises a far greater control of our 'choice'.

12:25 / 25.03.04

I think that it's also interesting to look at the bigger (or, more expensive) choices that we make in choosing what to buy -I've been reading a bit about (translation : reading other people's notes on) Don Norman's ideas about Emotional Design, which basically states that if we like the design of a product, we will buy that rather than similar products which may have better features. So is this just a way of furthering brand awareness (in which people decide they like Apple products because they like the look of the iBook) or of someone making an informed choice (deciding to own something because they personally like the look of it, rather than because it's the one their friends chose)?

The iBook example, incidentally, is basically me...

16:17 / 25.03.04

I don't know about that Vincennes...when it comes to expansive products like computers, mp3 players and the like, personal choice would tend to override peer pressure. If I'm going to spend over £250 on a product, I had better like it, inside and out. Would it maybe be better to say that once a product reaches a certain price level, the company invests more in the design in order to help justify the price? The theory being that you're more likely to shell out on an expensive item when it looks the part...

18:00 / 25.03.04

I agree with Anna that you really need to begin with a category of products before you can assess consumers' range of choice. I think in the case of food and beverages, there are millions of choices available to most of us and what we actually buy is based on personal preference rather than some advertising brainwashing effect. Sure, there's a McDonalds in every town, but if you'd rather get a deli sandwich that's readily available as well. Looked at another way, if you're a deli-owning sandwich maker, you don't have to be the CEO of an international franchise just to get your product to the consumer.

If you're talking about something like the music industry, that's a vastly different thing. In that case, it's like sleazenation was saying, money and big business do strongly influence what's available to the consumers.

But getting back to the consumer's side of things, what do you mean by educating consumers? Do you mean educating them about the scientifically tested merits or flaws of specific products, in the manner of Consumer Reports magazine? Or about the merits or flaws via peer review, like in epinions.com?

Or do you think that educating people about the "tools of the trade" of advertising would influence their spending very much? Because I'm not sure it would. For example, most of us know that fast food companies employ food artists to arrange a burger, say, to look much fresher and more appealing than it does in real life. We all know what a fast food burger really looks like, despite the ads, and most of us eat fast food anyway, despite the discrepancy.

17:55 / 27.03.04

in the case of food and beverages, there are millions of choices available to most of us and what we actually buy is based on personal preference rather than some advertising brainwashing effect.

Personal preference is certainly a factor, but I think that a lot of it is cultural as well. To return to the example of what brand of Coke to buy, whenever I want to get a can of malted battery acid I will always go for Coca Cola over Pepsi (or whatever other brands there are) simply because I refer to the drink as 'Coke'. I rarely even notice that there are other brands available when I'm buying it -so whilst I'm aware that the choice exists, I'm not sure that I make that choice. When there's not much to differentiate products (ie, there aren't any of the aesthetic factors I talked about in my last post) it tends to be easier to go with habit, which could be considered to be an 'uninformed' choice.

On the other hand, if I was buying something where there was little differentiation between products for the first time, I would almost certainly go with the product whose adverts annoyed me the least. To take what you said about the "tools of the trade" of advertising ibis -how closely do you think people analyse adverts? Because it's something I tend to do, just in the fairly trivial sense of "this Gap advert is clearly designed to make feel feel all warm and cosy and part of a great big family, and yet it is failing" -I think that that kind of thing influences my choices, how far is it true for anyone else?