The American Consumer Culture

America has always had a history of being a society that focused on a consumer society. As Americans, we follow a consumerist culture that focuses on individual values and material goods. I believe that American consumer culture shapes what American do and how they act in society. American consumers are portrayed by how marketers want them to be perceived in society. As Americans continue the tradition of consumer culture, this also leads American’s to pass down these habits onto the newer generations, as evident today. Overall, my perception still stands, teens today are obsessed with material goods and because of this, have become narcissistic. Through the elements of mass media, marketing teen obsession, and social class and branding, we

could see how American consumerism ideals affect teenagers and the downsides it has and will cause as time goes on.
As history has shown, mass media had always been used as a powerful propaganda tool to sway the masses. In contemporary society, it’s use has now transformed to benefit American consumerist values in the form of advertising and commercials. Added with the introduction of social media, consumerism has now evolved in many ways and with new ways to promote consumerism, also brings new ways for marketers to target the new generation of Americans, the teenager. From pop music, teen magazine, and television shows such as MTV, mass media has always had a huge influence on today’s teens. They continue to hold the power to open up new values to teen’s, making them obsess with material goods and the image of “the self”. This is also where the functionalist perspective theory is evident.
The average teenager listens to many styles of pop music and most of them are filled with lyrics that can affect their minds and behaviors. Music artists such as Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga, and Justin Bieber also become their role models. As role models, they help to shape how teens act in society, from mimicking their clothing style, personality and their attitudes, marketers use this as an advantage to sell their products. Even Obama has criticized Kim Kardashian and Kanye West as bad influences to teenagers. Saying shows such as Keeping Up with the Kardashians have increased the awareness of celebrity culture, leading to changes in aspirations of today’s youth. The show creates a materialistic mindset to teenagers, giving rise to their narcissistic behavior. Combined with teens heavy usage of social media, this also helps give marketers even more advantages to target the teen market, because no previous generation of Americans have been able to access technology that allows them to purchase products with just a click of a button. As mentioned earlier, the functionalist perspective can easily be seen evident in this theme. Examples of social integration, social facts, social dynamics, consensus, cooperation, and maintaining stability can easily be seen as marketers use mass media as a tool to spread consumerism to teenagers. Through social integration, we could see the average American teen feeling connected to his or her group or community. Most teens listen to the same pop music, wear the latest trends, and watch the same television shows. No one doesn’t want to be the outsider, teens will most likely try to conform to the mind site of their age group, because having a sense of connection with people the same age as you makes you feel secure. With the growth of social media, this only helps to further strengthen the connection between teens to conform and follow certain manners of acting and thinking in their group. With consumer culture using mass media to shape teen behaviors in their society, this also leads on to how marketing teen obsession will evidently lead to negative consequences in the future.
American teenagers have been called the “golden egg” for marketers.

As a result, marketers and advertisers rigorously target the teen consumer in any way they can. Teens have a staggering amount of buying power, in part because they have the ability to work and have influence over their parent’s money. Advertisers go as far as create movements in youth fashion, music, and food among other products. They call it “taking the brand to the street” and it includes using high-profile celebrities to endorse their products on T.V. or in their personal lives. Overall, the goal of marketing teen consumerism that most businesses follow can be seen as marketing the “cool” to teen’s, advertising body images, and packaging girlhood and boyhood. Teens are continually bombarded with limiting media stereotypes of what it is to be a girl or a boy in today’s world. They “packaged childhood” and sell it to them through ads and products; across all media, from T.V., music, movies, magazines, to video games and the internet. Be it body shape, skin condition, fashion, music, being cool, or just, having the right type of gadget, teenagers are very uncertain about who they are or where they fit in. Advertising works best when it creates an insecurity about something and such insecurities are easily found amongst teens. This is also where the social fact concept of the functionalist perspective can be seen in this theme. As American consumerism continues to market teen obsession, this creates an

externally imposed manner of acting, thinking, and feeling, which have a coercive power over the individual. As shown by a research that indicates that even personal relationships can’t stand up against money, for some 27% of girls surveyed in Seventeen Magazine, say they would break up with their boyfriends for $10,000. Sadly, American consumerism has created a society of individuals who only care for profits and products and American businesses are bringing this bad habit over to a new generation of consumers, the teenagers. As corporation’s continue to use mass media to influence teen consumerism in society and to market teen obsession, consumerism has also affected the social class of the teenager through the power of corporate branding.
Our social class helps determine our taste in clothes, food, music, TV shows, and many other everyday preferences.

American consumerism has created a mindset that spending helps to establish a person’s social position in society, the same can be said about teens. Marketers appeal to specific social classes of teens to market their goods. They try to appeal to their lack of social position because of their class and use celebrities, singers, or any form of media to open them up to consumerism ideals. A teens social class also establishes cliques in high schools, as researchers from Stanford have explored why cliques thrive in some high schools more than others. Schools that offer students more choice were more likely to be rank-ordered, cliquish and segregated by race, age, gender and social status. Teens in these high schools would form social groups to not only those of similar attitudes with likes and dislikes, but also to those who share the same materialistic values or ideals as they do. Teens are basically forced to conform to the same consumerist values as their group, have the same favorite bands or T.V. show, and having the favorite clothing brands and trends. Allen Kanner, a child psychologist, explains that the problem, “is that marketers manipulate that attraction, encouraging teens to use materialistic values to define who they are and aren't. In doing that, marketers distort the organic process of developing an identity by hooking self-value to brands." When

teens hit adolescents, they start engaging in the task of establishing a place to belong in the world away from family, questions of belonging and fitting in becomes paramount. This is why branding to teens is significant for marketers. Branding is about finding a group or tribe to identify with and businesses marketing to the Hipster subculture is a good example of this. The downsides of belonging and identification branding is that it encourages disapproval of anything different. This creates segmentation, segregation and hyper-individualistic attitudes which can be seen in our society today.
By observing the behavior of teens in public life, from seeing how they talk, act, and dress, we can accept the fact that American consumerism ideals have indeed affected the behavior of teens in society. Sadly enough, corporations continue to take advantage on teens by marketing and profiting off their adolescents and insecurities, creating a society of people who are only concern with their self-image and buying the latest products on the market. From using mass media to open up teen consumerism, marketing teen obsessions, and influencing branding to teens to get them to conform and get past restrictions place on them because of their social class. Advertising teen consumerism has now become diversified and grown to dominate every form of digital media, creating a new generation of consumerist eager to purchase whatever they can to fulfill demanding stands of beauty and cool. Which explains why the average teen is now labeled by most adults as a generation of egotistic, narcissistic individuals, who only care about taking selfies and creating hashtags. If American consumerism continues on this path, the next generation of Americans will eventually become a society with a culture that only cares about themselves, having material wealth, over consuming, and nothing else. However, there are still possibilities for improving and putting restrictions on how much a corporation can market off teenage consumption. We as Americans have the power to make our voices heard and help improve their future status in U.S. society. Just like how Americans had the power to create regulations and stop even the most powerful tobacco companies from marketing off the lives of minors with the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act in 2009. If we argue for more rules, policies, and regulations, we can limit corporate advertising to teens and protect them from consumerist ideals that will slowly corrupt their identity, culture, and society in the future.