The Ethical Consumer: A Role Model or Just Another Market Segment?
Bear with me as I talk about why I think ethical consumption is a myth.
Meet Bethy.
Bethy grew up shopping in department stores. They had everything! From black shoes to tank tops, bookstores that monopolized on school supplies, and a couple of fast-food chains on opposite ends that helped dictate where you would park your car.
She went to college where school uniforms weren’t a thing. Bethy developed a sense of fashion - branded T-shirts and white sneakers that were painfully worn during typhoon season. Classes were often scheduled one after the other and in socially distanced buildings, which meant that Bethy had no time to dine at the cafeteria so she would order takeout to eat at the back of the room.
After getting her business degree, she pursued a traditional career in banking. Bethy’s colleagues come from all walks of life, but she hung out with other women her age who came from top-tier universities. One of them used to be a student activist who raised awareness about climate change. She talked about how she commutes to work, brings an eco bag to the supermarket, and refuses single-use plastic straws at cafes.
Bethy listened, read up about it, and decided that she, too, would do her bit to save the planet. But she doesn’t think of herself as an activist. Bethy is an ordinary citizen who wants to be more mindful of her consumption habits. She has a list on her phone of all the restaurants she could visit that serve plant-based meals. She also only shops at brands that have sustainable practices - if they’re local, the better. Since some of the retailers don’t have physical shops, she makes sure to follow their Instagram accounts and order from them.
Ethical Consumption – From Hype to Mainstream
As a consumer, do you really care about where and how products are made?
The growing sustainability hype in urban commodities, food industries, and clothing brands makes it seem like global supply chains are changing drastically. But fundamental economics teaches us that traditional purchase behaviors are affected by quality and price as opposed to provenance. There is empirical evidence to support the cultural shift from individual consumerism to collective action, yet most of the discourse in marketing and consumer research examines the “ethical consumption gap” which refers to the failure of the ethical consumer to walk the talk despite growing knowledge about ethical consumption practices.
Bethy took the burden of ethical responsibility since it proved to be easy and accessible. Besides, we tend to follow trends that offer a path of least resistance. Since Bethy’s coworker was doing it, why shouldn’t she at least try? Ethical consumption is widely discussed in journals of sociology, cultural studies, and public policy where they emphasize the impact of political consumerism on the environment and society. I thought I knew what the internet was talking about as I read up on it, but once I discovered the literature, there was a clear disconnect. The early 2000s saw most researchers fixated on definitions and contradictions, leaving the practical studies to scholars of architecture, sustainability studies, and design. But how did ethical consumption appear in practice?
The mainstreaming of consumption has led to a heightened awareness of the government’s role in enforcing laws on consumer goods, such as insisting that food products provide ingredient information as well as nutritional content. The effects of globalized trading patterns also make it feasible to know where imported items come from because they carry “Made In” labels. But as I grew aware of how and where products are made, I began to ask myself: what happens when a product’s lifespan ends?
The Ethics of Disposables
In wartime America, Dixie® cups were marketed heavily as the first commercialized disposable cups made from paper. They were advertised to households, schools, and hospitals as a convenient, time-saving sanitary product that can also increase productivity, going as far as telling homemakers that they didn’t need to waste time washing glass cups anymore. The innovative product was primarily used in the military because soldiers were prone to getting sick from sharing their drinking containers, therefore switching to disposable paper cups to prevent the spread of communicable diseases.
Whereas Western economies have rationalized that increasing consumption patterns contribute to a better quality of life, this postmodern practice remains unattainable for developing countries. Researchers have studied that the excessive throughput of materials and energy required to keep consumers happy is unsustainable and has therefore led to the unmasking of one of capitalism’s ugly faces: throwaway culture. This practice has left landfills brimming with toxic waste and industrial supply chains utilizing cheap, non-renewable resources.
Another contributing factor occurred during the Great Depression when manufacturers adhered to a practice called “planned obsolescence” - the deliberate production of objects to quickly become superseded by the same product or a more advanced model. Apple products popularized it through a concept called “Imagineering”, but look up “Phoebus cartel” and you’ll find out how America’s light bulb manufacturers conspired to increase their market share by frequent consumer purchase. With this profit-oriented mindset, marketers have adopted the practice of selling a product based on novelty rather than quality and functionality.
Tim Cooper, professor of sustainable design and sustainable consumption at Nottingham Trent University, believes that “consumers share responsibility for the prevailing throwaway culture in industrialized nations” by linking consumer behavior to product life-spans. He argued that while industries are responsible for “absolute obsolescence” (i.e. the end of a product’s technical life due to its full usage or wear and tear), suppliers have no control over consumers who are guilty of disposing of still-functioning products, a practice which he termed “relative obsolescence”.
A contemporary example of an industry that has institutionalized planned obsolescence is fast fashion. Have you ever wondered how we got here?
Middle-class aspirations grew during the post-war economic boom of the 1950s when styles changed adjacent to technological developments and buying new became the norm in consumer markets. Once it became popular to “dress up”, it was easy to spot who had money and who didn’t through the quality of the clothes they wear, the colors and texture of the fabric, as well as the perceived value. Inevitably, as the textile industry produced more goods, the working class had to consume more in consequence, believing fashion writers and magazine editors that clothing styles should not only fit a purpose but should also change with the season. Industrialization saw people owning more garments than they need even though clothing was formerly considered a highly durable consumer good in the past.
Fast fashion paved the way for clothes to become more affordable, although consumers have witnessed these cheap clothes break apart in fast fashion as well. While the idea of disposable underwear might shock the poor, ordinary consumers have become more conscious of their wasteful tendencies by adopting habits like recycle, repair and reuse. The emergence of domestic thrift shops and second-hand clothing markets revealed the resourcefulness of a throwaway society, at the same time exposing the negative impact of apparel production on finite environmental resources. According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the fashion industry produces more carbon emissions than the aviation and maritime industries combined.
Looking Beyond the ‘Green’ Tag
Recently, I volunteered for a local environmental charity that wants to catalyze a circular economy in Hong Kong by reducing fashion’s water, chemical and carbon footprints. Redress Asia conducts programs that aim to change mindsets and practices to stop the creation of textile waste, as well as creating systems and partnerships that generate and showcase value in existing waste. One of the initial steps to doing this is to sort the tons of clothes they receive from brands like Zara and put them in piles - one for charity, one for business attire, one for the second-hand shop, and a separate pile for luxury goods that will be priced higher than the usual wearable worth $50. Then there will be separate boxes according to summer or winter season as well.
It was interesting to see what people threw away, what the other volunteers perceived as luxury, and what isn’t. For instance, I saw a MiuMiu dress get tossed into the charity pile.
The growth of second-hand consumption didn’t peak until the mid-1990s when online auction sites like eBay made it easy to buy and sell pre-loved goods. By this time, the stigma that used to haunt consumers buying from flea markets and garage sales have been detached, in place of ethical notions that to buy second-hand is sustainable and “green”. Our growing dependency on material culture means that ethical consumption has evolved to signal social and cultural capital, but some argued against the greening of second-hand consumption because consumers have individual aesthetic judgments based on the product’s material history, design elements, and cultural representations.
Current trends in ethical consumption regard consumers to be the driving force behind this behavior, but can it be pushed by business ideologies as well? Researchers have pointed out that ethical consumption is merely a convenient catch-all phrase rather than a well-defined set of good consumer practices to follow. For example, America’s obsession with the Dixie cups could be considered ethical in the twentieth century before widespread immunization was available. Kind of like how surgical face masks serve as protection from getting the coronavirus. Studies have shown that consumers also listen to what they are told, and they usually follow prominent experts or public figures who are trustworthy.
Empowered to Care, Not to Consume
In a cosmopolitan society where we are increasingly encouraged to shop for change, we must demand a more inclusive form of consumption that derives its ethical notions from social values, rather than individualistic ones. Personal habits cannot move the needle unless larger institutions that are part of the prevailing power structures will be moved first. Whereas consumers may express their knowledge about the ecological benefits of practicing sustainability, some will find it troublesome to achieve while others will feel it more naturally occurring in their everyday life.
Just as we can choose to be morally or factually ignorant of how commodities are made, companies can also behave similarly by demonstrating a lack of knowledge on how consumers use their products. Whether or not the ethical consumer is a marketing persona created in a board room or a morally ascendant individual whose influence inspired a community, the relationship between producers and consumers are intertwined and therefore, share responsibilities. The myth of ethical consumption ends when we begin to evaluate the intersectionality between the political, social, and economic aspects of consumption, and reflect on our ethical positions relative to our cultural experiences. There is no need to patronize the corporate nor the consumer when both are expected to create and police the marketplace through the practice of meaningful social behavior designed to care for what’s left in our resources and come up with ways to regenerate, not reproduce.
In my opinion, the biggest threat to society is this “crisis of moralism” which demonstrates a breakdown in the system wherein labels are attached, myths are made, yet no one is held accountable for the severe inequalities brought about by such social, cultural, and environmental ethics. Ethical consumption exists in the same economic system that favors those who are better organized with more valuable resources which inadvertently ostracizes ordinary consumers. Bethy wasn’t coerced into adopting what she thinks is a sustainable lifestyle, but did it truly help to heal the planet? The next time you push the responsibility to one party or another, pause and think about how you internalize your sustainable consumption habits in negotiation with cultural significance and social norms. Whereas consumption is central to the survival of an economy, the real form of ethical consumption manifests when consumers are empowered to care, not to consume.
Nice to meet you, fellow Bethy. 👯
Sources:
Cherrier, H. (2012). Sustainability in Practice: Exploring the Objective and Subjective Aspects of Personhood. Journal of Nonprofit & Public Sector Marketing, 24(4), 247-267. doi:10.1080/10495142.2012.733639
Cooper, T. (2010). The Significance of Product Longevity. In T. Cooper (Ed.), Longer Lasting Products: Alternatives to the Throwaway Society (pp. 3-36). London, New York: Routledge.
Devinney, T. M., Auger, P., & Eckhardt, G. M. (2010). The Myth of the Ethical Consumer. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Franklin, A. (2011). 11 The ethics of second-hand consumption. In T. Lewis & E. Potter (Eds.), Ethical consumption: A critical introduction (pp. 156-168). London & New York: Routledge.
Giordano, A. (n.d.). A Wholesome Drink: The Disposable Paper Cup. Disposable America. Retrieved from https://disposableamerica.org/course-projects/a-wholesome-drink/
Harrison, R., Newholm, T., & Shaw, D. (2005). The Ethical Consumer. London: SAGE.
Lewis, T., & Potter, E. (2011). Ethical consumption: A critical introduction. London and New York: Routledge.
Littler, J. (2008). Radical Consumption. Berkshire: McGraw-Hill Education.
Littler, J. (2011). What’s wrong with ethical consumption. In T. Lewis & E. Potter (Eds.), Ethical consumption: A critical introduction (pp. 27-39). London and New York: Routledge.