In this episode, Ananya Bhargava interviews Dean Batson, an instructor at Arizona State University who specializes in analyzing consumerism through the lens of communication. Diving into the intersection of capitalism, branding, and corporate messaging tactics, the discussion examines how powerful forces shape our purchasing decisions and the illusion of choice in the marketplace.
Transcript
[Intro music]
Ananya Bhargava: Consumerism is more than just buying things; it’s a system shaped by powerful forces that influence what we purchase and even why we purchase it. This means that we, as consumers, are constantly navigating a world where our choices are shaped by unseen forces, making it crucial to understand and recognize how these influences work.
I’m joined today by Dean Batson, an instructor at ASU who teaches the university’s Communication in Consumerism course. Before transitioning to the classroom, Batson spent years in the corporate world, leading successful marketing and communication teams.
In this episode, we’ll dive deep into how manipulation, branding, and corporate messaging tactics shape our buying decisions every single day. From the dominance of oligopolies to the subtle ways corporations control narratives, we’ll explore how these forces shape the future of consumerism.
Bhargava: So how would you define consumerism and consumer culture?
Dean Batson: So consumerism is us buying stuff and the mechanism that we keep going. So it works where capitalism gives rise to consumerism to fuel its growth, and then consumerism helps build the mechanism for capitalism to keep going. And here we are in the middle where it’s a relentless pursuit of profit, which keeps us on the hamster wheel of being consumers.
Bhargava: And so could you elaborate a bit more about capitalism? I think a lot of people get consumerism and capitalism mixed up. So how are they exactly different?
Batson: So capitalism is the system in which our country is set up, where we have the freedom, the private property of businesses. It’s not owned by the state, and so businesses can be free to do what they need in order to make a profit. And that has built the consumer culture. The critical look at it is because where does that stop? Right? We don’t want to look at consumerism completely in a negative light. Because for 50,000 years of humans, you know, humans being, what have we’ve done? We strived to have basic goods to survive. And so now consumerism, we can get something delivered today. So in that aspect, hey, it’s awesome, but it’s not this binary good or bad. Because, so we love consumerism for its ability to give us sustainable goods that we need to survive. On the other hand, there’s a lot of manipulation going on and a lot of elements that we don’t really see. Give us the illusion of choice where we’re getting manipulated into buying products and services.
Bhargava: Why is the consumerism class that we have here offered at ASU, why is it a communication class? I feel like it could be a sociology class. It could be marketing, right? Why do you think it’s specifically communication?
Batson: So that’s a great question. One communication space is the psychology of humanity, of how we interact with people, right? So specifically, communication is like, “hey, how do you message?” It’s where there’s a sender and a receiver and a coder and a decoder, right? So that’s the basis of communication. Well, this is communication, but it’s coming from manufacturers and advertisers. A lot of these products and services and these things that we’re talking about is communication. One of the negatives of consumerism is the manipulative part, and so that’s all being done to us through communication. So that’s why those two things are tied together.
Bhargava: So since you brought up manipulation, how do we draw that line between manipulation and advertising and persuasion?
Batson: In advertising, we have truth in advertising, right? So we do have some sort of regulation that you have to be truthful to some nebulous extent in advertising. When it turns from persuasion to manipulation, persuasion is a win-win for both. It’s an honest, open discussion without omitting details. Manipulation is the omission of details, and the intent is different. It’s a one side wins thing. So now, when we talk about consumerism, it’s not just the ad coming to us, “Oh, that’s a little manipulative.” It’s not that. It’s the fact that we don’t know everything else that’s going on that’s removing us, as you recall, we use the term dupes and agents, that’s removing our agency and purchasing and turning us into dupes. So the dupe would be, are you buying a product or service or subscribing to some experience because of your agency? You’re like, “I’m doing this because I want to” or have you been duped into it? And so an example of that that we use in class all the time, and sadly, it never fails, is I’ll ask “Who has Vans on?” And there’s always three or four, maybe more people have Vans on. And I was like, “Alright, if you can get the exact same shoe, exactly the same quality, looks identical, and it was a quarter of the price, but it was Sketchers. Would you buy it?” And everybody’s like, “No, ain’t getting Skechers” They’re like, “No way!” So then what’s the reason for that? How did we get in there? So we gave up our agency to be identified and associated with that brand of Vans. When they gamify some kind of experience, you know, some product or service, when they gamify experience, they’re not advertising like, “Hey I’m going to manipulate you via dopamine.” Right? It’s manipulative. It’s omitted from us. And so that’s where the manipulation comes in.
Bhargava: And then you briefly mentioned how consumer culture has grown from what it was like decades ago. So could you talk a bit about how it’s evolved from its origins to the present day, and what are the key changes we’ve seen over the last few decades?
Batson: Some of these companies have gotten so large and they’ve merged or bought out other companies that we don’t know what we’re really buying. Thrifting is becoming, you know, more popular, right? And people want niche products and services, so they’ll go to Etsy. Well, Etsy is mostly owned by Vanguard and BlackRock, I believe. That’s the largest shareholders. So that’s the biggest change, is that all the profits are funneling to fewer and fewer people, which not just the profits, are going there. That means fewer and fewer people are offering insights. Fewer and fewer people are offering potential innovative technologies, new ways to go, because there’s just less people. And like I said, their interests align.
Bhargava: I think a lot of people who defend consumerism and defend market economy and pure competition. I think a major thing that’s always brought up is the variety that we have to choose from as consumers, right? So it’s kind of strange that there’s actually not any real choices there. I just watched this video on this company called Luxottica. So basically, they design and manufacture eyewear for like every major luxury brand you can think of. So Chanel, Prada, like all of it, they also own RayBan, and they own Sunglass Hut and LensCrafters. So could you talk a bit about what exactly, what factors make certain objects more desirable than others in consumer culture?
Batson: We’ll use the extreme example of sunglasses, right? Those Maybach that are like $3,500 for the sunglasses. So it’s use value, is why it’s the same as my $20 glasses, right? It’s protecting my eyes from the sun. But where does that $3,400 value come from? There’s nothing inherent about that. So that’s being associated with the experience that you get, the identity that you are willing to pay to be in the club of the people who can afford those sunglasses.
Bhargava: Yeah, and how do you think brands do this? How is it possible that just branding strategies can result in such an insane markup?
Batson: There’s a couple things. They’ll do market research to see what, you know, not to be too flippant, but to see what they can get away with, so they’ll do market research. The other thing is, they’re going to build the experience. And so we have things right now that are really good examples of building the experience that make us pay that we haven’t experienced before. Take, for example, Casper and Purple. So instead of just going to get a mattress, now, you go to one of their stores, and it’s this entire experience, right? Somebody comes over to you how you feel, like you’re in a coffee shop. So they’re creating that experience. And so we’re being duped into thinking that, “Oh, this is what we need to do to buy a mattress.” But at the end of the day, it’s the mattress that we could have bought without that experience. I mean, look at – you know, you got to give them kudos – look at Nike. They’re mundane athletic shoes from 50 years ago, that’s when people were like, “Oh, I needed some running shoes.” And there was no glamor, and there was no lifestyle attached to it. They built that lifestyle. So now, most of the people that buy Nike, expensive Nike shoes, they’re not going out and they’re not running, right? They’re just buying the Nike shoes to be associated with that lifestyle.
Bhargava: And do you think there’s any aspect of FOMO or like the need to fit in that factors into consumer culture?
Batson: Why is it if I ask any class, “How many people here own an iPhone?” and it’s going to be 95-98% of everybody in class, but if I go out in the street to people more my age, and I ask 30 people, it’s going to be a greater mix, and it’s because of that desire to fit in. You have a group of eight or nine friends, and somebody doesn’t have an iPhone, they can’t iMessage, they can’t FaceTime. That’s a pressure, right? So that’s a manipulative, intentional experience that Apple built, and it’s a closed system, a closed environment. And if you want to be cool like the other kids, you have to pay up to get into the club.
Bhargava: That also leads to social proof. If we were to talk a bit about e-commerce, specifically, if we’re talking about, like, reviews or testimonials or even influencer marketing, what role do you think social proof plays in this?
Batson: From the marketing standpoint, from companies, they put great effort into that. One, they’re going to go hire influencers, because they want everybody else to say, “Oh, my God, this is trending. This is a thing everybody’s doing this.” Is another thing that a marketing company will do, they’ll hire somebody to write 300 blog posts about how great a product it is. And so as the consumer, you’re out there innocently, “You know what? I want to do my research before I buy this.” So you’re Googling and you’re like “Here’s an article, here’s an article.” And you read 15 blogs and they’re all raving about this particular product, but you don’t know that you’ve just been manipulated, because all of those blog posts were hired by the company to be written. The third part of that is reviews. So a company will say, “I’m a restaurant and I’ve got 3.4 stars,” which, as you know, that’s pretty deadly, right? Nobody goes to a restaurant with three points like, you gotta be over four, right? You gotta be north of four. And so what will happen is that a legit, respectable marketing company will go and get legit, respectable reviews. But what they’ll do is they’ll market to the database at that restaurant, they got 5000 people. They’ll grab that database. They’ll send them an email, say, “Hey, do the survey for us of what you think about, you know, Joe’s Pizza.” And people fill it out, and let’s say only 80 of the 5000 give it a great review, then throw all the 1000s out. You keep the 80. You keep those 80. Then you contact them. You’re like, “Hey, thanks for writing this great review. Would you mind clicking here and then copy and pasting what you said into the Google reviews?” And all of a sudden you get 20 of them to do it, but the 3.4 goes to a 4.4 and nothing about Joe’s Pizza changed. Service didn’t change. It’s just that we communicated to the right people.
Bhargava: So then, would you say, in your opinion, the responsibility should be placed more on the companies themselves to not be manipulative?
Batson: Yeah, because we scratched the surface with what you and I said about truth in advertising. But okay, that’s just the ad coming. What about all the other things you know going on? I think that maybe one of the places to start is to be more careful about what companies we allow to merge or own another company, because that’s really where our choices are limited. And okay, so we have limited choices, we think we don’t, whatever that might suck. But the real problem there is they’re now deciding the direction, because it’s really hard for a little startup to compete with an organization that literally has billions of dollars.
Bhargava: How do you think this is going to develop? And what do you think consumerism is going to look like in the future?
Batson: I wish I knew, but I think we are reaching the point where there’s too much power and money funneling to too few, where people are going to have to step up in order to have more freedom of choice.
Bhargava: It sounds like your biggest hope is consumers collectively stepping up and holding companies accountable, and then also government regulation. Those two things together would help curb consumer culture?
Batson: That’s the goal. Then you had mentioned earlier, government. That’s part of the problem too, is the fact if you run for office, and I want to run for the same office against you, and you have a billion dollars, and I don’t, you’re going to most likely win. If you don’t have the billion dollars, but you have 10 companies that they like. “Hey, I like what you have to say. You can say, all right, you, you fund me, and I’ll keep saying that.” And so the people with the money, wherever that comes from, they tend to win by a vast majority of the time. And so that’s the other problem is we’re up against that. I don’t know if you recall we talked about Dr. Clair Patterson in the 60s, he inadvertently discovered that lead was contaminating the environment. He was tasked with finding the exact age of the earth. So he had nothing to do with energy companies, oil companies. No matter what he did, he kept getting contaminated results of lead. So he found out it was because of leaded gasoline and it was polluting the world. And lead is very poisonous to us. And so for decades, this became his thing. Now he became an activist to get lead out of gasoline. But the organizations, the oil companies fought him and they discredited him, and they hired scientists and they tried to destroy his career, and it took decades because he is this one individual, and he’s up against a multi-billion dollar, not even a company, a realm of companies, and they’re hiring lobbyists that are putting in politicians in power to enforce what they want to do. And so it took this guy 28 years, or something like that, before it finally took effect, and now we don’t have lead in the gasoline.
And I personally strive to remind myself of what I told you. So 10,000 years ago, probably upwards of just 3-400 years ago, our daily life was to try and find stuff to survive, food and drink and shelter, and axes or whatever items we needed. So consumerism provides that for us now, right? It gives us a better quality of life. So that’s what I try and remind myself, that we’re here because of that. However, it’s not this binary thing, one good, one bad, right? It’s not bad. We can have the good thing of consumer, and we could still figure out a way we’re not being manipulated, right? And we don’t do things that, you know, take our agency away. Be a captain, not a passenger.
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