The view of consumption beyond sustenance and life preservation as a matter of the “heart” and
a process of heaping up individual joy is as at least as old as recorded civilization. Similarly, the
study of consumption and humans as consumers is one of the oldest intellectual pursuits which,
having drawn on a multitude of disciplines, has been formalized as a field that came to be known
as Consumer Research; a field so broad that “it stands for everything, which in this case is
tantamount to nothing” (Holbrook 1987). Only a little over a decade ago consumption was still
described as “a poorly understood phenomenon” (Wilk 1999, p. 1) with ambiguous boundaries
between the decision-making process and its abstractions (Shocker, Ben-Akiva, Boccara &
Nedungadi 1991). Despite the proliferation of consumer research addressing the social and
cultural influences on human behavior, as well as significant advances in the study of the
experiential, symbolic and ideological aspects of consumption, the end result is “more obfuscating
than clarifying” (Arnould & Thompson 2005: 868).This is caused by paradigmatic incoherencies
(Holbrook 1987; Wilk 1999, 2002) and results in ineffective policymaking, with regards to
curtailing consumerism and environmentally harmful consumption (Wilk 1999), and inefficient
marketing actions with regards to turning potential to buying and loyal customers (Shocker et
al. 1991).What is more important, the marketing discipline appears to have shown little concern
to limiting the damage caused to the social and physical environment by its processes, products
and by-products and to have taken an amoralistic stance to consumption.
In answering the question “what is consumer research?,” Holbrook (1987: 131) equates our lives
with the “pains and difficulties imposed by prices and budget constraints” and the “existential
anguish in choosing among products, none of which is perfect” and describes “the human
condition [as] an imperfect and tainted world in which consumers can only strive to surmount
their constant barriers to fulfillment.” Like all other social sciences, the fundamental responsibility
of marketing is acknowledged to be the making of the world into a better place for people to
live happier lives in. It is just that for marketing, “the State of Paradise” is described as that “in
which Adam and Eve’s sole task was to enjoy pleasant forms of consumption.”
It follows that, since consummation is to be found in consumption, the task of our discipline
is to employ macro and microeconomics, psychology, sociology, anthropology and humanities
(Holbrook 1987) in order to study the social, cultural, economic and psychological aspects of
consumer behavior as independent variables, givens beyond moral judgment, with the aim of
increasing consumption, irrespective of the consequences of consumerism (in the sense of the
dominant social and economic order that encourages the purchase of goods and services in
ever-greater amounts) for the lives of other people and future generations. In this framework,
the role of philosophy has been dismissed as being of limited scope; praxeology is seen as an
inadequate basis for a consumer theory of reasoned action, ethics as confined to addressing
“phenomena of consumer misbehavior” and the philosophy of science as a source of glimpses
into “approaches that depart from the prevailing tendency toward logical empiricism” (Holbrook
1987: 130).