Marketing Communication and Consumer Culture

The course introduces students to the two disciplinary perspectives on consumer culture and consumer behaviour: the perspective of marketing, and the perspective of consumer culture theory. As such, the course is divided into two successive but interwoven parts.

The first part is focused on analysing consumers’ decision-making process, stages of the decision-making processes and types of these processes (behaviourist concept of marketing, consumer as a black box and on internal and external impacts on his/her consumer behaviour). The second part introduces students to the consumer culture theory (mainly cultural, interpretive and critical approaches) and explains the role of media technologies (particularly photography and other forms of technical images) in consumer culture.

Although both of these disciplinary perspectives consider consumption as a set of social and cultural practices, marketing focuses mostly on the question “How to communicate and sell commodities?” while consumer culture theory critically considers the social, cultural, individual and the environmental consequences of consumer culture and consumption, for example. The key aim of the course is to enable students to draw on both of these perspectives to understand contemporary consumer culture and consumption behaviour more deeply and widely.

Key Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to

  • think about marketing communications as an important aspect for marketing management;
  • apply several skills (critical, analytical, methodological and theoretical) for understanding and interpreting particular aspects, practices and processes of contemporary consumer culture;
  • think about consumer culture and consumer behaviour in connection with concepts of ideology, social structure, technology, identity, gender, signifying practices, power, sexuality, gender, environmentalism and ethics etc.

Course contents

  • Topics, theories, concepts: marketing process model, communication models, push and pull marketing communication model, historical role of advertising in communication with consumers. Consumer social networks and social media. Approaches and metrics for social network analysis.
  • Anthropological aspects of consumer behavior: stereotyping, ethnocentrism, cultural dimension. Using cultural dimensions in webdesign. Sociological Aspects of Consumer Behavior: Conformity – Asch’s Experiment, Obedience – Milgram’s Experiment, Hofling’s Experiment, Zimbardo’s Experiment.
  • The technological and semiotic specificity of photographic images and wider debates around modernity, late-modernity, visual, and consumer culture & photography as commodity; the myth of photographic truth; mechanical reproduction and cultural industry; technology, culture and consumption; consumer culture and postmodernism (society of spectacle; panopticism and surveillance; hyper reality, simulacra and simulation; post-history; aestheticization of everyday life; lifestyle and consumer culture,…).
  • Photography as a cultural tool used to express consumer culture (advertisements and commercial photography) & photography as a cultural tool used to criticise consumer culture; the grammar of visual design and social semiotics; semiotics of technical images; stereotypes, ideology and meaning in advertisement; popular culture or return of the repressed, active audience and the role of spectator; encoding and decoding; semiotic banditry and subvertising; consumer culture and cultures of consumption; intertextuality and multivocality; discursive spaces of photography; photography, advertisement, naturalisation and mythology; strategies and tactics; creative misuse, pastiche, remix, remake; collaborative media and convergent culture; database photography etc.
Requirement type Weight
Active lecture/seminar/workshop/tutorial participation 70 %
Final test 30 %
Total 100 %

Lecturers