Editing Consumerism (section)

===Culture of consumption===
[[File:The Fable of the Bees (1705).jpg|left|thumb|[[Bernard Mandeville]]'s work ''[[Fable of the Bees]]'', which justified [[conspicuous consumption]]]]
The pattern of intensified consumption became particularly visible in the 17th century in London, where the [[landed gentry|gentry]] and prosperous merchants took up residence and promoted a culture of luxury and consumption that slowly extended across socio-economic boundaries. Marketplaces expanded as shopping centres, such as the New Exchange, opened in 1609 by [[Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury|Robert Cecil]] in the [[Strand, London|Strand]]. Shops started to become important as places for Londoners to meet and socialize and became popular destinations alongside the theatre. From 1660, [[English Restoration|Restoration]] London also saw the growth of luxury buildings as advertisements for social position, with speculative architects like [[Nicholas Barbon]] and [[Lionel Cranfield, 1st Earl of Middlesex|Lionel Cranfield]] operating. This then-scandalous line of thought caused great controversy with the publication of the influential work ''[[Fable of the Bees]]'' in 1714, in which [[Bernard Mandeville]] argued that a country's prosperity ultimately lay in the self-interest of the consumer.<ref>
{{cite book
 | author1 = Linda Levy Peck
 | title = Consuming Splendor: Society and Culture in Seventeenth-Century England
 | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=-jM0ZvlYofoC
 | location = Cambridge
 | publisher = Cambridge University Press
 | date = 2005
 | isbn = 9780521842327
 | access-date = 14 June 2020
}}
</ref>{{page needed|date=June 2020}}

[[File:Horse Frightened by a Lion by Josiah Wedgwood.jpg|thumb|right|[[Josiah Wedgwood]]'s pottery, a status symbol of consumerism in the late 18th century]]

The [[pottery]] entrepreneur and inventor, [[Josiah Wedgwood]], noticed the way that aristocratic fashions, themselves subject to periodic changes in direction, slowly filtered down through different classes of society. He pioneered the use of marketing techniques to influence and manipulate the movement of prevailing tastes and preferences to cause the aristocracy to accept his goods; it was only a matter of time before the middle classes also rapidly bought up his goods. Other producers of a wide range of other products followed his example, and the spread and importance of consumption fashions became steadily more important.<ref>
{{cite web
|url=http://www.quarc.de/fileadmin/downloads/Coming%20to%20live%20in%20a%20consumer%20society%20%28chapter%202%29.pdf
|title=Coming to live in a consumer society
|access-date=29 October 2013
|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130810222240/http://www.quarc.de/fileadmin/downloads/Coming%20to%20live%20in%20a%20consumer%20society%20%28chapter%202%29.pdf
|archive-date=10 August 2013|url-status=dead
|quote = The origins of the consumer society as we know it today can be traced back a few hundred years. According to McKendrick, Brewer and Plumb (1982) the birthplace can be found in eighteenth century England. However, as McCracken (1988) has pointed out, the consumer revolution as a whole needs to be seen as part of a larger transformation in Western societies, which began in the sixteenth century. The social changes brought about by that transformation resulted in the modification of Western concepts of time, space, society, the individual, the family and the state. This provided the base on which the consumer revolution could thrive and develop into a mass phenomenon. McCracken (1988) was one of the first scholars offering a comprehensive review of the history of consumption. He approached the subject by dividing the course of events into three moments. The first moment falls within the last quarter of the sixteenth century in Elizabethan England where profound changes in consumption pattern occurred in a small section of the population. This was the moment where some of the established concepts, notably the concepts of space, the individual and the family began to falter. The circumstances bringing about these changes served as a primer for the consumer movement that would come a century later. McCracken describes this as the second moment. It was characterized by a heightened propensity to spend, by a greatly extended choice of goods, and an increased frequency of purchases. Fashion started to play an important role too, and, for the first time, the individual as a consumer became the target of manipulative attempts. The origins of modern marketing instruments can be traced back to this time. With the rise of the third moment, the consumer movement was already a structural feature of life(McCracken, 1988). However, the development was not yet completed. The 19th century added new qualities to the movement and turned it into a 'dream world of consumption' (Williams, 1982).
}}
</ref> Since then, advertising has played a major role in fostering a consumerist society, marketing goods through various platforms in nearly all aspects of [[human life (disambiguation)|human life]], and pushing the message that the potential customer's personal life requires some product.<ref name="auto1">{{Cite journal|last1=Czarnecka|first1=Barbara|last2=Schivinski|first2=Bruno|date=17 June 2019|title=Do Consumers Acculturated to Global Consumer Culture Buy More Impulsively? The Moderating Role of Attitudes towards and Beliefs about Advertising|journal=Journal of Global Marketing|volume=32|issue=4|pages=219–238|doi=10.1080/08911762.2019.1600094|s2cid=182181403|issn=0891-1762|url=https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/26848/1/Czarnecka%20and%20Schivinski%20Accepted%20JGM.pdf}}</ref>