Pelican has an interesting post on the "Diderot Effect" in marketing:
Essentially, the Diderot unities are the relationship between a product and a cultural role or cultural meaning. You all know how this works. If I say Rolex, what car do you imagine the owner driving: a hyundai or a BMW?
BMW would be the correct answer. The Diderot effect is the cultural phenomenon where a purchase of an item outside the cultural roles of your other items will often lead you to consume additional items in the new cultural category inducing a spiral of consumption. Simply, if your entire wardrobe consists of ratty second-hand pants and t-shirts and cheap sneakers and you buy a new pair of leather Prada shoes, your old shoes and clothes will look shitty. If you are like most consumers, this will induce additional consumption so that your clothes will match your new shoes and everything will be in the same cultural category again. What I am learning is that advertisers like to induce the "departure purchase." They want to figure out how to get you to buy that pair of Prada shoes.
A brief Google search shows that this was discussed by Juliet Schor in her book The Overspent American and probably by countless others, but I hadn’t heard the term before, though it’s a concept we’re probably all grasped before, intuitively at least. So thanks to Pelican for bringing it to my attention. And like him, I often get upset to see beloved cultural products used in consumer product hucksterism. But let me offer a few thoughts on the Diderot Effect (DE, below), including reservations (some of which he may well agree with):
1) Left critiques of consumerism stress the irrationality of consumers, but there is sometimes a certain rationality among consumers under DE’s sway. To the extent that the use-value of consumer products lies in their conspicuous display of social status, the value on one consumer item (say, the Prada shoes, or a designer sofa) is incomplete if other status markers downgrade them.
2) The consumer goods for which this applies tend to be ones primarily in the arenas of cultural distinction that are not legitimate culture (like art or literature) but for which matters of taste do say a lot about class: clothing, food, home dÃ(c)cor, cars. Other consumer products are relatively less caught up in a conspicuous consumption dynamic: household products, hardware, electronics. Some, like personal care products, fall in between.
3) The play of consumer products in cultural arenas of distinction is more complicated than we sometimes give credit for. One complaint I hear from my fashion-conscious friends is how gauche an "off-the-rack" Prada wardrobe is. For some class stata and their status claims, the cultural knowledge and sensibility that can profitably match Prada shoes with old jeans or vintage sweaters is preferable to a strict application of DE.
4) Similarly, some lower-end consumers have class strategies that run counter to the DE. For those who desire status beyond which they can afford — or for whom cultural capital far exceeds economic capital — consumption is strategic. A shabby decor may be punctuated by one centerpiece furniture item or an original work of art dear to the owner. Women famously buy expensive accessories like handbags to upgrade mass-market wardrobes (since, of course, the handbag can be used with every outfit, whereas a garment can be worn only occasionally.) A modestly paid worker may pour his savings into a status-symbol car. C. Wright Mills uses the example of the white collar worker who, for a two-week vacation, will live a luxury life that is beyond her or his means the rest of the year.
5) We should be careful in ascribing the source of causality. The BMW owner may be buying a Rolex because his car makes his watch look dÃ(c)classÃ(c), but just as likely, if not more likely, he is simply using both to express a conspicuous consumption. Just because two consumer items are proximate in social space doesn’t establish a DE between the two.
6) Along those lines, I’m not sure the Coke ad Pelican mentions is truly a Diderot Unity. Like DE marketing, it tries to get the cachÃ(c) of one to rub off from one thing to the other. It’s hard to imagine — in the minds of Coke or potential consumer — that one would ever be compelled to buy Coke because one’s Warhol print or Fisherspooner CD seemed incomplete without it.
7) Some advertisers may well put emphasis on "departure purchases", but it’s only in an advertiser’s interest to do so when other products of the DE are provided by the same company. Pottery Barn may well push cheaper decor items in the hopes that consumers start imagining themselves as part of "Pottery Barn lifestyle" and buy big-ticket furniture items. But Rolex has absolutely no incentive to advertise for its watches in the hopes that consumer upgrade their cars as well. They’re advertising to sell more Rolex watches.
8) Not all marketing is equally successful in exploiting the DE. My guess is that marketers and advertisers are more successful when situation 1) applies. Attempt to create lifestyle affinity for products not showing a total lifestyle market effect may seem forced to the average consumer.
When talking about marketing we should be wary of providing a "media effects" model wherein ads simply produce a desired effect in the consumer. Yes, advertising does influence consumer behavior, generally on an unconscious and irrational basis: if it didn’t, no one would bother spending the sums they do on it. But to persuade and coax, ads end up activating social dynamics and personal desires already in place. The rhetorical means by which ads engage those dynamics is well worth putting under a microscope. But one shouldn’t confuse the lever with the machine.
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