Consumer Boycotts as a Consequence of Consumerism

Consumerism

Consumerism is a social and economic order that is based on the systematic creation and fostering of a desire to purchase goods or services in even greater amounts. The term “consumerism” is also used to refer to the consumerist movement or consumer activism, which seeks to protect and inform consumers by requiring such practices as honest packaging and advertising, product guarantees, and improved safety standards (Mirchevska & Markova, 2011). Consumerism defines a specific analysis category that studies the phenomenon that came up with mass production development and consumption expansion (Bostan, Burciu, & Grosu, 2010). It has been defined for example as “organized group pressure which has become a set of values held not only by the consumers of a company’s products but also within the wider society” (Jones et al., 2005, p. 35). Kotler defined consumerism “as a social movement designed to augment the rights and powers of buyers in relation to sellers” (Varadarajan & Thirunarayana, 1990, p. 6). By consumerism, it is understood that assembly of ideologies regarding social activism, pressure groups (consumer associations) and in general that trend that tries to raise the rights and the consumer’s power in relation to the entities (Bostan, Burciu, & Grosu, 2010).

In the twentieth century capitalism, the focus shifted increasingly from production to consumption, resulting in a parallel shift from the control and exploitation of workers to the control and exploitation of consumers. Capitalism has created a controllable “consuming mass” to complement the control of the “producing mass”. The central concern here is to concentrate the means of consumption on the control of consumers in order to get them to spend as much as possible (Assad, 2007).

Protecting the consumer is not an invention of our times, the consumer protection legislation, for example against altered food and scale fraud appears ever since the Old Testament and also in the Hammurabi's Code of Laws (Bostan, Burciu, & Grosu, 2010). Various scholars have traced the roots of consumerism back to the 16th century England, with its inspiration seeming to come from the Renaissance Italy (Brunner, 1996). The emergence of consumer-oriented societies has become the central trait of our era. In such societies, sustaining a productive economy demands that consumption should become a way of life, along with the purchase and usage of goods to be converted from a utilitarian exercise to ritualistic excess. The consumerism phenomenon was born in the beginning of the 20th century in the USA, where in the year 1906, the first mass protests were so powerful that they constrained the federal government to approve a very important set of rules to the industry at that time (Bostan, Burciu, & Grosu, 2010, p. 20).