Good topic Jennifer ! My favorite hobby is being an amateur sociologist . I am 54 years old . I can track within my lifetime the popularization of the term "consumer". We used to be addressed as customers and shoppers . Businesses would vie for our attention and our loyalty. Housewives were praised for stretching their dollars and crusty old men were impossible to convince . Now , wikipedia defines consumer as :
"The consumer is the one who pays to consume the goods and services produced. As such, consumers play a vital role in the economic system of a nation. In the absence of effective consumer demand, producers would lack one of the key motivations to produce: to
sell to consumers. The consumer also forms part of the chain of distribution.
Typically, when business people and economists talk of consumers, they are talking about the person as consumer, an aggregated commodity item with little individuality other than that expressed in the decision to buy or not to buy. However, there is a trend in marketing to individualize the concept. Instead of generating broad demographic profiles and psycho-graphic profiles of market segments, marketers have started to engage in personalized marketing, permission marketing, and mass customization."
I guess the age of the customer is dead .
My first recollection of the word consumer was in the early 70's seeing the latest issues of "Consumers Digest" . That was a
magazine designed to objectively critique products and give people ammunition to be discerning shoppers . They would actually bash products if it was deserved . Now it reads like the gushy uncritical advertisement digest that it is .
Interesting that the word consumer was originated in the field of biology to describe the individuals within a food web . How did the term "consumer" become synonomous with customer ? We will have to dig up a few Freudians to
answer that . Though , in a marketplace full of schlock it is easy to imagine how . We have become seen as sheep grazing within the plasticized disposable pasture-place . Baaaah !
The government has also acted to quantify individuals into groups so as to target their marketing/propaganda more efficiently . In 1962 Kennedy introduced the "Consumers Bill of Rights" continuing the momentum towards a nanny state which views us as consumers of public services . Not as individuals who have lives outside of
politics .
So , to assist in your quest for a term to describe those of us who hate being labeled as consumers I like the word Earthling . As in "Greetings Earthling , We come in Peace". It would not take much deductive reasoning to convince anyone stuck in a demographic slot to admit they were an Earthling too .
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Good one
