About Sarah and this Substack
I’m a marketing professor with a decade of industry experience and the call is coming from inside the house. Our society has a complex relationship with consumerism. And we need to talk about it.
On the one hand, many of our individual desires and wants are met by the market. Cool.
On the other hand, society is grappling with material overproduction, structural inequalities, time sickness, polarization, and increasing rates of depression. Stuff does not equal happy.
I think about consumer culture a lot — especially how what we buy1, and therefore what values we normalize, impacts multiple stakeholders throughout society. When I make a purchase (which I do a lot of, as the primary purchaser for a household of four + a dog), I primarily benefit. I receive something of value. But what about the people and resources behind my purchases? My first foray into this type of critical thinking came in 2011, as a junior in college with a closet full of H&M and Forever 21, reading Elizabeth Cline’s Overdressed. This book was the beginning of a journey that fundamentally changed how I look at my role in a consumer society. And this was before the real uptick of digital lifestyle marketing as we know it today— Pinterest and instagram and Amazon influencers and mobile shopping and user generated content and hyper-targeted advertising and … the list of marketing tactics goes on.
Given this mindset, you might find it interesting (or funny or sad or some twist of the two) that I’ve spent nearly a decade working for large (and I mean, the biggest) retailers and consumer goods companies in the US. “A positive actor from the inside”, I’ve always pledged to myself. That’s largely been true, but I do have a complicated relationship with my own time in industry.
I know a lot about marketing and how to do it well. I also know a lot about the social impacts of marketing and how things can go awry — quickly.
During my PhD I studied what I perceived to be the root of consuming more consciously - our relationship with time. I figured, if a person could interrogate their relationship to time, then they could also interrogate their relationship with consumer culture and the things that they buy. After all, so many of the products we buy with the highest amounts of externalities are decidedly fast: fast fashion, fast food, fast travel.
I’ve published academic research on the phenomenon of social acceleration and consumer culture, cause marketing, sustainable consumption behaviors, cultural marketing strategy, and cultural research methodologies.
My writing on substack explores our market-mediated relationship to time and life, the vast personal and social implications of consumer culture, and offers inspiration for embarking on a journey to consume more consciously… whatever that looks like for you.
Frankly, I often air out ideas here before they’re quite ready. Writing on substack is a personal practice that I’m humbled others share in. If you’ve made it this far, and if you read anything I’ve written, thank you—truly— for journeying with me, and for your kindness and curiosity as we explore the topic of conscious consumerism together.
Sarah
I’m realizing that this sentence, and paragraph, could be written alternatively so as to shift responsibility from consumer to marketer or vice versa. Instead of writing: “what we buy, and therefore what values we normalize, impacts multiple stakeholders throughout society” I could also write: “what marketers sell to us, and therefore what values are normalized throughout consumer culture, impacts multiple stakeholders throughout society”. I realize this. There is legitimate pushback (exhibits a, b, c) to the idea of “consumer responsibilization”), and I partially agree. Companies should act ethically. But. Many of them won’t, and not because they are filled with terrible people of no ethical standing, but because the incentive structure for companies (i.e., that publicly and privately funded enterprises have short-term ROI expectations) just isn’t set up for it. I choose to view companies (perhaps for my own peace of mind) as decidedly not nefarious. I also think that it helps to de-personalize these enterprising entities as players of a game. All that said — I strongly believe consumers have a role to play in this game, to practice a level of literacy and “consciousness” regarding how the market is organized and how consumerism impacts lives.
