Концепт: философия, религия, культура (Sep 2018)
“CONSUMER TOTEMISM” AS AN INSTITUTE OF MODERN CONSUMER SOCIETY
Abstract
The hypothetical design of the post-war social system was developed by the ideologists of the youth movement of the 60s, the philosophers of the Frankfurt school, theorists of postmodernism and neo-Marxists who understood it as a society of fiction. The founder of the conceptual critique of the consumer society is G Debor, who developed the concept of “performance”. J. Baudrillard, continuing the traditions of his teacher, considers the process of consumption as a sociogenerating process, which underlies the generation of all social relations. The article is focused on the study of the consumer society current state, which emerges in the situation of realization of the postmodern idea of “plurality” and the emphasized diversity in consumer activity. As a result, there is a situation in the post-mass society, when the social group as an impersonal mass is replaced by a tribe whose main difference is the orientation towards the permanent socio-cultural self-identification of its members. As a part of consumer activities, we can identify consumer tribes, the core of which is in companies that use branding technologies. The difference in this case is that relationship vector between the product and the trade mark changes radically towards the trade mark, now it starts to determine the specifics of production. Significant expansion of the methodological basis of modern marketing through the inclusion of developments in the field of psychology, sociology, and cultural studies makes it possible to form the culturological concept of consumer totemism, which is considered in the article as an important institution of the modern consumer society. The brand totem begins to determine social identification of the consumer tribe members, including both internal and external consumers who share values and produced cultural style.
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