I came across an interesting book this week by Lizabeth Cohen - Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies, Dept. History Harvard University. Entitled A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America
Cohen explains:
What I discovered was a shared understanding among many Americans, beginning right after World War II and lasting into the mid-1970s, that the best strategy for reconstructing the nation's economy and reaffirming its democratic values lay with promoting the expansion of mass consumption. Policy makers, business and labor leaders, along with many ordinary Americans put mass consumption at the center of their plans for a prosperous postwar nation. Not only would a dynamic demand-driven economy provide the best route to recovery and affluence, but it would also, they hoped, nurture the long-sought ideal of a more egalitarian and democratic nation. Citizens, living better than ever before, would be on an equal footing with their similarly prospering neighbors. So being a good citizen and a good consumer became intertwined.
Sometimes its easy to forget our recent past and the drivers for significant policy decisions. which in turn become imbedded and forgotten.
But the nature of consumption has changed , as content has decoupled from its format - superdistribution, the move from the agricultural clock and industrial mindset to a 24/7 world means that we have to stop and think afresh what we make, why we make it and who is going to use it.
Alan Mitchell says:
The information age won't reach its full potential just because of a few inventions like the internet. It needs to create a new and different system capable of unleashing the win-win potential inherent in plummeting transaction costs, ever richer content and new flows of information. And to do so it needs its own web of institutions, practices and concepts: joint-info-stock companies or consumer agents, relationships and communities, consumers as information investors and co-producers seeking value "in my life" - and buyer centric marketing
In this context conventional notions about marketing and mass consumers marketing is like the silent movies of the 21st Century.
Simon London Wrting for the Financial Times (Monday 27th June 2005) wrote
In business as in art, we live in a postmodern era. Old certainties are being demolished and relationships redefined. Everything you thought about business has been upended. The relationship between companies and customers is no exception. The old notion that producers produce and consumers consume is regarded passé by management theorists.
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