At first glance, the ‘consumer culture’ expression is associated with the world of merchandise, shopping centers, commercial ads, and advertising brands. In the book ‘Cultura do consumo: fundamentos e formas contemporâneas’ [Consumer culture: foundations and contemporary forms], published by FGV Press, researcher Isleide Arruda Fontenelle reveals that this expression has a much deeper meaning: it is the culture in which we live, shaping a big part of our identities and affecting how we behave and connect. The book will be launched on June 13, at 6:30 p.m., at Livraria da Vila, in Sao Paulo (Rua Fradique Coutinho, 915, Pinheiros).

The goal of the book is to provide an insight into the role of consumption in contemporary society and the business world, from a different perspective than consumer behavior, marketing, and advertising management. The historical figure of the consumer was born from the modern bourgeois individual model, and it took 150 years for this culture to gain its current form and be considered the main commodity of capitalism in the late 20^th century.

The work addresses the creation and transformation process of consumer culture in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, analyzing the role of department stores; public relations; marketing and consumer behavior research; commercial ads; advertising brands and branding; psychology and psychoanalysis; ultimately leading up to the present day, facing the challenges of environmental crisis and the impacts of new technologies.

Thus, the consumer culture has been reinventing itself from this new reality through phenomena such as responsible consumption, experience consumption, and the hybrid producer-consumer figure: the ‘prosumer.’

Such historical analysis of the consumer culture reveals that it was never meant to become the hegemonic cultural form of the modern world. The book presents two theories to explain why it happened: the theory of capitalism, which allows us to understand the fundamental role of consumption in assigning value to capital; and the theory of passions, which reveals the long-standing tradeoff between desire and culture.

Go to the website for more information on the book, in Portuguese.