Lecture 8-Mass-Mediated Ideologies and Consumers’ Interpretive Strategies Flashcards
(19 cards)
What are audiences and why do they matter?
Audience are not merely passive consumers but active participants who can create, co-create or even harm the value of marketplace objects through their engagement. It can shape narratives, influence brand trajectories, and even reshape entire markets through practices ranging from fan fiction and activism to reframing or rejecting content.
Audiences are:
- Diverse, dynamic and powerful collective.
-can add value to the marketplace objects they’re fans of.
- they can also cause harm to one another, and to the marketplace object (Johnny Deep issue as an example)
- They can profoundly reshape the markets they participate in.
Object of Attention
The focal point that draws and holds the attention of an audience, thereby constituting the audience. This can be a product, brand, celebrity, media content, or even another audience.
Imagined Audience
Imagined Audience is a mental construct formed by individuals to guide how they present themselves online. It refers to the people one believes will see, interpret, and respons to their content–shaped by technological platforms.
Example:
Lina curates her LinkedIn posts to appeal to future employers, imagining recruiters as her audience. On Instagram, she shares memes and personal content for friends. Her imagined audiences shape how she presents herself on each platform.
Parasocial Relationship
One-sided emotional connections to celebrities or characters.
Passive Audience
Consume marketplace objects just as they are
Active audiences
Involved in changing marketplace objects, including creating their own content.
(Fan fictions, fan communities, events)
-Fans might become influencers in their own right.
-Helkps in creating value for fellow audience members.
Megaphone Effect
When ordinary consumers gain large-scale visibility and influence through digital platforms, allowing them to shape public opinion and brand meaning without traditional media or celebrity status.
Example:
A beauty enthusiast on TikTok posts a review that goes viral, influencing thousands of people to buy (or boycott) a product—despite not being a celebrity or professional reviewer.
Transmedia Connections
The web of interconnected platforms and media formats that collectively build and extend the story or identity of a marketplace object (e.g., brand, celebrity, series). These connections can span across websites, social media, books, fan forums, merchandise, and more.
Example: Fans of Stranger Things engage with the show’s story by watching on Netflix, reading spin-off books, following actors on Instagram, joining Reddit forums, and even attending themed events.
What are the Impacts of audience engagement with marketplace objects?
- Creating value for fellow audience members.
- Harming of objects of Attention
- Remaking markets
(obvious in the field of fashion)
Measuring Audience differently
Old model: Numbers, ratings, reach
New Model: Connectedness, influence, emotional investments
A small but deeply invested audience may be more powerful than a large but passive one.
*Engagement quality matters more than just size.
Consumer Movements
an organized, passionate collectives that seek to transform aspects of consumer culture in response to perceived marketplace injustices.
It outlines how these movements leverage strategies like awareness creation, regulatory influence, and direct market intervention, and shows how digital technologies have revolutionized their formation, organization, and impact.
Characteristic of Consumer movements
- Consumer movements are persistent, organized and motivated efforts by groups of consumers to change some element of consumer culture.
-are collective moral projects, born out of a shared outrage, anger, frustration, or disgust
3 Consumer movements use when fighting for change
- Creating awareness
showing an alternative view of the world and articulating who is standing in the way of the vision.
*Boycott and ”Buycott”
- influencing regulators and stakeholders
Since consumers are typically not the strongest actors in market networks, they recruit other market actors as allies in their fight against injustice.
*Lobbying, drafting legislation proposals, providing political allies with material.
- Direct marketing Interventions
Not waiting for anyone else to take action but doing it oneself, e.g., by creating new distribution networks.
*Community Supported Agriculture / REKO-ringar
If we are so rich, why aren’t we happy?
Aristotle noted that although humankind values many great things, like health, fame thinking that they will make us happy. thus, happiness is only intrinsic goal people seek for its own sake, the bottom line of all desire.
Progress = Choice = Happiness?
This formula is misleading—consumer choice doesn’t always lead to happiness
Source: Shankar et al. (2006)
Key Points:
Consumption often leads to misery, not joy
Markets construct endless desires, not needs
“Desire” = perpetual, imaginative, and often unsatisfiable
Marketing promotes the illusion that happiness is just one purchase away
why do we continue chasing money?
because people use consumption not just to be happy, but to manage their identity and social relationship
The ”social fixation” can on the one hand lead people to actions that increase their subjective well-being. For example by forming strong friendships.
if stuff does not make us happy, what does?
🔹 Flow Experiences – Activities so engaging and meaningful that they are worth doing for their own sake (autotelic).
🔹 Meaningful Social Connections – Deep relationships and community involvement.
🔹 Time over Things – Spending money to free up time (e.g., outsourcing chores) improves happiness more than buying material stuff.
🔹 Pursuing Purpose & Creativity – Setting goals aligned with personal values and passions.
“Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” (2006)
Even though consumer culture offers more choice and stuff, it often results in misery instead of happiness. The article critiques the assumption that progress = choice = happiness.
Key Points:
🔹 Overconsumption ≠ Fulfillment:
More goods and choices don’t guarantee well-being—people still feel empty, anxious, and dissatisfied.
🔹 Desire > Need:
The market thrives on desires (which are insatiable), not needs (which can be fulfilled). Consumers are stuck in a loop of wanting.
🔹 Neoliberal Marketing Ideology:
Marketing positions itself as just “giving people what they want,” but this absolves it from responsibility for the misery it might cause.
🔹 Emotional Toll:
Modern consumers feel pressured to perform success and happiness (especially online), leading to identity stress and mental health strain.
🔹 Critical Call:
The authors urge marketers and scholars to rethink how marketing might be contributing to systemic unhappiness—and to imagine alternatives.
