Week 5 - Marketing and Society

Youth Consumption Cultures

  • Consumption plays a crucial role in the lives of teenagers, helping them resolve conflicts, navigate peer relationships, and gain popularity or status.

Age and Consumer Culture

  • Generational cohorts:
    • Silent Generation: 1928 - 1945
    • Baby Boomers: 1946 - 1964
    • Generation X: 1965 - 1980
    • Generation Y: 1981 - 1996
    • Generation Z: 1997 – 2012
    • Generation Alpha: 2013 – 2025

Gen Z

  • Digital natives.
  • Values-driven and accepting of differences.
  • Focused on stability and health.
  • Largely comprises teenagers and represents a lucrative segment.

Gen Y

  • Highly educated and starting to make their mark on the world.
  • Shaped by negative world economic events.
  • Possess a social change mindset.
  • Shaped by technological innovations and digital cultures.
  • Value convenience.

Youth Subcultures and Consumption

  • Youth cultures are understood through the concept of subcultures.
  • Subculture:
    • A ‘way of life’ distinguished from mainstream (adult/parent) society.
    • Functions as a form of critique and resistance.
    • Creatively and symbolically expressed, especially through consumption and the body.
    • Objects transformed and given new symbolic meanings – ‘bricolage’ (de Certeau 1984).
    • Creates a subversive style that expresses identity and values of the subculture and challenges the mainstream (Hebdige 1979).

Youth Culture and Market Cooptation

  • Subcultures are eventually absorbed into the mainstream through a process of market cooptation.
  • Speaks to the ‘trickle up’ effect in styles and the field of fashion (Blumberg 1974).
  • Digital cultures tend to be the birthplace of most youth subcultures today.
  • Cooptation can be challenged by sub-cultures through the creation of new cultural meanings and styles.

Mid-life and Older Consumers

Gen X

  • Grew up during global times of political change, economic instability, and the onset of terrorism.
  • ‘Latchkey’ grunge generation cast as cynical and disaffected.
  • Anti-corporate and difficult to engage through marketing.
  • Have a