{"id":1601,"date":"2010-07-14T13:50:05","date_gmt":"2010-07-14T12:50:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/music-matters\/?p=1601"},"modified":"2010-07-15T16:16:07","modified_gmt":"2010-07-15T15:16:07","slug":"i-don%e2%80%99t-have-the-power-cultural-consumers-and-their-wallets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/music-matters\/2010\/07\/14\/i-don%e2%80%99t-have-the-power-cultural-consumers-and-their-wallets\/","title":{"rendered":"I don\u2019t have the power: cultural consumers and their wallets"},"content":{"rendered":"

As consumers, we should have a lot of power. It\u2019s our money that companies want, that marketing strategies are devised for, to help us to part with our cash for things we either want, or didn\u2019t realise we wanted. Audiences are turned into commodities, entities with profiles and habits towards which companies can tailor their marketing campaigns to achieve maximum efficiency,\u00a0which supermarkets can index and target with specific adverts for products relevant to particular consumer groups. Products are matched with relevant consumers, with advertising crafted to appeal specifically to them alone.<\/p>\n

\"Wallet\"
A tool of power ?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The culture industries are no exception to this: as consumers of culture, we are also labelled, profiled and targeted: how often have you been asked to fill out a questionnaire that came with a CD, or sign up for promotional features by an arts organisation\u2019s website, or been confronted by a pop-up survey on a website saying \u2018your views are important to us ?\u2019<\/p>\n

The cost of producing a cultural commodity for popular consumption is balanced against consumer group spending power: cost-effectiveness is key.\u00a0 Ticket prices for concerts and exhibitions, the number of dates on a performing tour, number of nights\u2019 run on a show: all these are factors in off-setting production costs against income recovered. Competition for audiences in the cultural sector must be huge.<\/p>\n

If, as consumers, we are so important to arts industries, if companies and organisations are so desperate to attract our custom, and hence our cash, why aren\u2019t we wielding more power ? Why aren\u2019t promoters offering us things that we do want to visit, to see or to hear ? Why isn\u2019t competition for audiences and for ticket-sales translating into a Golden Age of Artistic Production and consumption ?<\/p>\n

The loyalty-card schemes run by supermarkets are a tool for helping them define customers in terms of the products they purchase regularly. A person who buys nappies and powdered formula milk is probably a good target for money-off vouchers for baby food and clothing; but it\u2019s getting harder to divide consumers so easily across the wider spectrum when looking at their cultural consumption.It\u2019s easier to run a list of products someone purchases from a supermarket, and ascertain what they purchase regularly and what related products might be of interest. It\u2019s perhaps less easy to do this with someone\u2019s cultural predilections (unless companies can access one\u2019s browsing history, and assuming one does most of one\u2019s reading and listening on-line).<\/p>\n

As Nicholas Garnham writes, \u2018\u2019What analysis of the cultural industries does bring home to us is the need to take the question […] of cultural resources seriously, together with the question of audiences \u2013 who they are, how they are formed, and how they can best be served<\/em>\u2019 (my italics) (from \u2018Concepts of Culture \u2013 public policy and the cultural industries\u2019, <\/em>printed in Gray and McGuigan, Studying Culture<\/em>, 1993: 60-61). That last part is crucial: as far as dis-empowering the spending power of cultural audiences is concerned, companies are more likely to prefer \u2018how they can best be manipulated.\u2019<\/p>\n

Why are we often dissatisfied with what we are offered ? One only has to read the critics\u2019 columns in the papers to read of another disappointing exhibition, an artist\u2019s newly-released album that\u2019s a let-down or another mindless summer action blockbuster film.<\/p>\n

Perhaps it\u2019s complicated by the plurality of society, both in terms of consumer group identities as well as the multiple streams by which culture can be created and consumed. Society is too diverse in its interests to be formed into meaningful or significant groups, easily able to be defined. With everything from medieval music to Muse, Botticelli to Bacon, Chaucer to Chomsky, it\u2019s difficult to define individual consumer bases as having a specific taste that makes them a marketing consultant\u2019s dream: the intellectual who reads Schopenhauer, listens to Slipknot and Webern, is vegetarian, likes Studio Ghibli films and paintings by Monet would be a marketing nightmare. Television schedules of course have to please as wide a spectrum of viewers as they can, and what is enjoyable to one is dross to another.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t have a simple answer to the question of why we, as cultural consumers, don\u2019t have more power in our wallets. Perhaps the realisation that we ought to is enough to start with. It\u2019s time to start using our power more effectively. How we begin to do that is another question.<\/p>\n