Chapter 7 consumers

CHAPTER 7

CONSUMERS

Who decides what we buy?

Aims

• 
  To understand the nature and importance of consumption as an economic activity.
  
• 
  To advance a sociocultural perspective for framing consumption dynamics.
  
• 
  To appreciate the changing spatial patterns, networks, and territories of retailing.
  
• 
  To reflect on how consumption more generally is both spatially uneven and place-specific.
  
• 
  To explore how tourists consume and experience places in different ways.
  

1. 
   Introduction
   

As consumers, how do we know which goods and services we want to buy? These purchase decisions, while sometimes based simply on impulse, usually depend upon flows of information, which can come from many different sources, such as the producers of the goods and services, the media, peers, friends, and family members. In particular, however, advertising plays a critical role in constructing and disseminating knowledge about commodities. Advertising is a huge global business worth an estimated US$600 billion a year, with the world’s largest advertising group, WPP, generating annual revenue of

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ct-jS billion and employing 200,000 people worldwide. The leading global lers on advertising are consumer goods, technology, and automobile firms. f_20l6, for example, the two biggest spenders were Proctor St Gamble nct'10.5 billion) and Samsung Electronics (US$9.9 billion). These huge invest- ; _ents arc designed to create and sustain demand for products by making

nnections between the particular qualities of the commodities concerned and Hir senses-of-self and the lifestyles to which we aspire as consumers. Advertisers thus seek to influence the many decisions we make as consumers about what to k_t)y _ from the everyday purchase of food and drink, to regular demands for clothing, books, and music, to more infrequent large acquisitions such as cars, TVs, and furniture.

In recent times, however, the nature of advertising has been transformed in ways that are very revealing about contemporary consumption and technologi­cal dynamics. In 2017, for the first time global spending on internet advertising (37.6 per cent of the total) exceeded that spent on television advertising (34 per cent). Mobile internet (19.8 percent) had risen rapidly to overtake desktop inter­net (17.H per cent) spending, while by far the fastest growing digital advertising medium was social media such as Facebook and WeChat (developed by China’s Tencent). Amazingly, two-thirds of the roughly US$220 billion spent on online advertising in that year was paid to just three American and three Chinese com­panies, namely Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent. The top two firms alone collected half of global online advertising revenues: Google accounted for one-third (US$73.8 billion) with Facebook receiving 16 per cent (US$36.3 billion) (data from www.zenithmedia.com, accessed 7 May 2018). While some of these firms have predominantly one function, such as Facebook (social media) or Baidu (search engine), the activities of the Chinese giants Alibaba and Tencent straddle e-commerce, online payment systems, and social media.

Such data offer a snapshot of the profound ongoing transformations that are taking place in the overlapping online worlds of social media, advertising, and retailing. Increasingly, we are alerted to new goods and services, research and discuss their qualities, and purchase them through digital platforms as part of our daily online activities. Scratch beneath the surface, however, and there are several important geographical dimensions to these seemingly ubiquitous devel­opments. First, while the growing significance of large, globally networked internet companies is clear, they are reworking patterns of consumption in une­ven ways. For instance, while Amazon and Google are dominant in the United States and many other markets, in China for regulatory and consumer prefer­ence reasons, the clear market leaders are Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu. Amazon has expanded internationally most effectively into Western Europe, while Alibaba has focused on Southeast Asia. At the same time, these online worlds are not simply erasing what went before, but rather continue to sit alongside, and interact with, ‘old’ technologies. For instance, while internet advertising had expanded rapidly by 2017, as noted above, over 60 per cent of advertisi_n , revenue was still derived from traditional channels, such as television, novvsp-^ pers/magazines, radio, cinema, and billboards. Similarly, as we shall see in thj- chapter, store-based and online modes of retailing are co-evol ving and will _Con tinue to do so.

Second, we should not assume that everyone in the world can seamlessly tap into these various online forums — uneven internet access remains a notable fea­ture of the contemporary world. At the end of 2017, the global internet penetra­tion rate was 54 per cent, with levels of 35 per cent in Africa and 4.X per cent in Asia, providing an important reminder that by no means everyone has access to the online worlds of consumption. Third, within these broad spatial patterns of uneven access, there are place-specific dynamics at work. Working at the nexus of social media, advertising and retailing allows producers and advertisers to target their goods and services at individual consumers with increasing sophistication and accuracy. What began over 20 years ago through the collection of consumer data through supermarket loyalty cards has developed into the dominant form of advertising in a highly fragmented world of consumption. Importantly, this tar­geting is simultaneously social and spatial, as firms adjust their targeting to reflect the place-specific nature of consumption dynamics. Consumption is also given a local flavour in the way that it is not an individual practice, but is informed by social relationships and peer reviews and opinions. When as consumers we buy goods and services, it is increasingly likely that we will have done pre-purchase research using a wide range of available online forums, such as TripAdvisor for hotel and travel expenditure, but also discussed them within our family and friendship chat groups.

Building upon these initial insights, this chapter proceeds in four sections. First, we consider different interpretations of who controls consumption dynamics, arguing for a perspective that takes the roles of both corporations and consumers seriously (Section 7.2). The sociocultural perspective we advocate is well attuned to the various uneven geographies of consumption that are the core focus of the chapter. Second, we look at the changing spatial patterns of retailing in the con­temporary era, profiling globalization processes and urban scale shifts before con­sidering the rise of online retailing and rhe prevalence of informal spaces ot retailing (Section 7.3). Third, we broaden out from retailing to consider how con­sumption practices are always and unavoidably geographically uneven in two key respects: the spatial distribution of consumers of different types, and the ways in which consumers use the commodities they buy as part of place-specific processes of identity construction (Section 7.4). Fourth, we explore how consumption is nor only heavily shaped by the interconnected places in which it occurs bur also note rhat certain kinds of places are themselves actively consumed through tourism (Section 7.5). Overall, this chapter aims to reveal how consumption is just as geographically varied and complex as processes of production identified in Chapters 4 and 5.

2. 
   Towards Viewing Consumption as a Sociocultural Process
   

W|k> controls consumption processes? There are different perspectives on this uestion, depending on how one views the relationship between production and consumption within the capitalist system. As we saw in Chapter 4, the production network concept allows us to see how consumption is the final step in a series of material transformations and value-adding activities. The discussion in Section 7.1 may gi^{vt> 1П}^а1 impression that large corporations of different kinds, rather than consumers, are the dominant shapers of consumption within such networks. This resonates with what is known as the ctmstmicrs-as-dupes viewpoint, which emphasizes the primacy of production within the economic system as a whole. From such a perspective, consumption is read as the outcome of changes in the nature of the production process and therefore driven by these capitalist firms. It is a pleasure-seeking but ultimately regressive activity in which passive consum­ers are enticed into parting with their money, thereby delivering profits for pro­ducers and refuelling the basic capitalist system outlined in Chapter 3. As we shall see shortly, the rise of retail capital over the last few decades has complicated the picture in that consumption is increasingly shaped by retail rather than manufac­turing corporations. Most importantly, however, the consumers-as-dupes perspective places capitalist corporations rather than consumers in control of consumption processes. While there are strong elements of truth to this interpre­tation, this chapter will demonstrate how it underplays the extent to which individuals and groups of consumers exert their agency through their diverse consumption practices.

This can be compared with the consumer sovereignty view, which foregrounds the free will of individual consumers. Deriving from neoclassical economics, consumption is seen here as an economic transaction dependent on individual preferences and price-based decisions. Rational consumers - the homo economicus introduced in Chapter 2, acting on full information about different products and prices and in accordance with their preferences, will make informed decisions about which products to buy. In turn, these actions will have an impact on the production process, as market information about which products are popular feeds back through retailers to manufacturers. In short, consumers can choose whether to buy the products on offer or not, and as such they have considerable sovereignty, or control, over the economic system as a whole. Again, as with the consumer-as-dupes perspective, this approach is not entirely without merit. Capitalist firms - whether manufacturers, retailers, or other service providers - do indeed closely monitor their customers and markets and respond rapidly to sig­nals they receive about the popularity (or not) of the commodities they produce. The atomistic, rational view of consumers inherent in the sovereignty view has clear limitations, however, particularly in the way that it represents consumption decisions as being taken by autonomous consumers unaffected by wider society and its various norms and expectations.

By contrast, a sociocultural perspective emphasizes the way in which consurn ers actively construct their own identity through their consumption practices Such an approach draws attention to the other intersecting facets of identity —such as class, gender, ethnicity, age, and sexuality (see also Chapter 13) - and looks at how consumers knowingly purchase certain commodities and use them in specific ways as part of an active process of identity construction. These processes of identity construction, in turn, are not individualized as in the consumer sovereignty view, but are instead part of larger social forces and trends within society (e.g. teenage fashion or ethical purchases). Rather than simply being rational economic actors (homo economicus), consumers also exercise aesthetic judgement (homo aestheticus) and are unavoidably social beings (homo socio­logists) (Warde 2017). From such a perspective, the interactions between con­sumers and producers are viewed as complex and two-way. Consumption processes are clearly influenced by manufacturing and retail corporations and the commodities they offer, but consumers purchase such goods selectively and knowingly: firms, in turn, will respond to emerging consumption dynamics within society.

This approach - which underpins the remainder of this chapter - incorporates three important aspects of consumption. First, it looks beyond the initial decision to buy a particular commodity and conceives of consumption as a process involv­ing the sale, purchase, and subsequent use of commodities. Hence, it is not only about the interface between those offering products/services for sale, and those making decisions about which products/services to buy, but is also about what people do with commodities after buying them. Consumption is thus much more than just a simple economic transaction at the point of sale. Rather, as a process it includes multiple sociocultural aspects of commodities and their use, encom­passing a wide range of activities: purchasing, shopping, using, discarding, recy­cling, reusing, wearing, washing, eating, leisure, tourism, and home provisioning and renovation, among others. In addition to retailing, consumption is taking place in a wide range of outlets, such as shops, restaurants, and hotels, and repair, servicing, cleaning, and recycling operations, many of which are increasingly important economic sectors in their own right. An important implication here is that in addition to being consumers, many people also depend on consumption- related employment for their work and livelihood (see Box 7.1).

Second, the nature of consumption within capitalism should not be seen an unchanging, but rather as evolving over time. In line with our discussion of post- Fordism in Chapter 3, it is possible to examine the emergence of what might be called post-Fordist consumption tendencies over the past few decades (see Table 7.1). In general, the Fordist era was characterized by the large-scale, mass consumption of a relatively limited range of standardized commodities (originating, most famously, with the Model T car, available as Flenry Ford notably declared, in ‘any colour so long as it’s black’). The system was driven by economies of scale and low prices that

FURTHER THINKING

Box 7.1 Consumption work

In developed economies, a growing proportion of the workforce is employed in services such as retailing, restaurants, tourism, and entertainment. At the sitne time, the rapid growth in these kinds of jobs has raised questions qbout their quality, security, and desirability. These doubts have prompted economic geographers (and other social scientists) to look within work­places and explore the nature of work in the consumption sphere. This research has revealed that consumption-related jobs tend to be character­ized by some, or all, of the following features:

• 
  Socially constructed as low status jobs within society (e.g. ‘the waitress’, ‘the flight attendant’, and ‘the checkout assistant’) and receiving rela­tively low wage rates.
  
• 
  Low levels, or indeed the complete absence of, collective representation and unionization.
  
• 
  Dominated by part-time and temporary contracts rather than full-time positions. In some instances (e.g. tourism and Christmas shopping), there may be a marked seasonality to availability of employment.
  
• 
  Technology-based surveillance of the workforce both to monitor work­ers (e.g. listening in to telephone sales calls and measuring productivity of fast-food operatives) and to deploy them efficiently (e.g. gauging the appropriate number of checkout staff in a supermarket).
  
• 
  Based around labour-intensive, repetitive tasks which cannot easily be replaced by technology (e.g. waiting on tables or cutting hair).
  
• 
  Having a ‘performative’ component in which workers are required to take on a particular role or personality. This can occur in both face-to- face (e.g. the scripts given to fast-food workers) and technologically mediated situations (e.g. Indian call centre workers taking on English names as part of scripted encounters with customers). These perfor­mances may challenge workers’ true senses of identity and lead to sub­stantial stress levels.
  
• 
  The social construction of many of these jobs as essentially ‘female’ (e.g. flight attendants) and/or being for young people (e.g. fast-food workers, and bar and nightclub staff), reinforced through recruitment practices.
  
• 
  Selective recruitment on the basis of a wide range of other personal attributes - ethnicity, bodily appearance, weight, bodily hygiene, dress and style, and interpersonal skills - to fulfil the requirements of the per­formative encounter with customers.
  

For more, see McDowell (2009).

Table 7.1 Mass consumption and post-Fordist consumption compared

Characteristics of mass Characteristics of post-Fordist consumpti_0tl

Collective consumption Demands for familiarity from consumers Undifferentiated products/ services Large-scale standardized production Low prices

Stable products with long life cycles

Large numbers of consumers ‘Functional’ consumption
consumption

Increased market segmentation Greater volatility of consumer preferences

Highly differentiated products/services

Increased preference for non-mass produced commodities Price as one of many purchasing considerations, alongside quality, design, novelty, etc.

Rapid turnover of new products with shorter life cycles Multiple small niche markets Consumption less ‘functional’ and more about aesthetics

Growth of consumer movements, alternative, and ethical consumption

enabled the widespread consumption of a specific range of household and personal goods. The post-Fordist era, by comparison, seems to have engendered a much more fragmented consumption pattern in which many highly differentiated products are offered to a much wider range of consumer groups or niches. This mode of consump­tion is driven less by the price and functionality of commodities, and more by the aesthetic and symbolic value they bring to consumers. It is shaped by knowledgeable end consumers making strategic decisions about the commodities that they wish to buy. Persuasive though such arguments are, it is important to recognize that the prevalence of post-Fordist consumption processes is highly uneven across different places and sectors. We will come back to this point.

Third, and as we shall see in the remainder of the chapter, a sociocultural per­spective also allows the uneven geographies of consumption to be laid bare. In terms of spatial patterns, the ‘everyday’ nature of many consumption processes means that they necessarily have a more extensive and disparate geography than other economic activities. Put simply, while not every city or region will have a major manufacturing plant, all will have supermarkets, cinemas, petrol stations, restaurants, libraries, recycling plants, and the like. Indeed, in some places, the whole economy can be based primarily around such activities - think, for example, of leisure and tourism destinations such as Las Vegas or the Maldives. Equally, however, we need to comprehend the ways in which the nature of consumption var­ies geographically, due in large part to the sociocultural dimensions which give it a

I j _ice__specific character. Indeed, understanding consumption sometimes neces- ^vC1'^V * _[|_{iat we} consider even smaller spatial scales, such as the body and the home. ^' 'tiisrance, while most commodities that we buy ultimately end up at home, home lishings (e.g. furniture, curtains, bed sheets, paint, and flooring) are explicitly у I ved to create particular environments and spaces within the home. This mate- J process of decoration and maintenance contributes to identity formation, as the £_0(TlC becomes a micro-space of creativity and personal expression.

3. 
   The Shifting Spatial Patterns of Retailing
   

In this sccrion we explore the shifting spatial patterns of retailing. Retailing is a core element of wider consumption processes and a huge economic sector in its own right. In the United Kingdom in 2017, for example, it employed 2.9 million people - approximately 10 per cent of the total workforce - across 300,000 businesses, while in the United States, 15.8 million people were employed in just over I million retail outlets. The changing geographies of retailing are therefore an important component of the contemporary economic landscape. We consider these changing geographies in four stages. First, we will profile the ongoing globalization of retail activity and its wider impacts. Second, we explore the shifting intra-national geographies of retailing, and, in particular, dynamics at the urban scale. Third, we move beyond physical retail forms to consider the growing significance of online retailing, before fourth, looking at the prevalence of both temporary and quasi-permanent informal retail spaces.

The Globalization of Retailing

Perhaps the most important geographical outcome of the rising power of retailers has been the extensive globalization of retailing over the last 30 years, as retailers have sought new market opportunities in which to invest the profits secured from their home markets. This period has seen the emergence of a select group of retail­ers as transnational corporations (described in Chapter 5) that have used aggres­sive merger and acquisition activities, backed up by subsequent rapid organic growth, to assume dominant market positions across a range of countries. The globalization of retailing is not a new process, dating back as far as the late 1800s. Foreign expansion started to take off in the 1960s, and was initially domi­nated by investments between the leading economies of North America, Western Europe, and Japan. Since the mid-1990s, however, more aggressive expansion has taken on an entirely new geographical configuration. Figure 7.1, for instance, shows the global store distribution of the world’s largest retailer Wal-Mart in early 2018. Wal-Mart has operations in China, India, Japan, the United Kingdom, and 13 countries in sub-Saharan Africa in addition to extensive operations throughout the Americas. In general, investment by the leading retail TNCs is

L targeted towards countries in so-called emerging regions, most notably South ""'j'cViitnil America, East and Southeast Asia, and Eastern Europe.