1,612 tonnes. This is the amount of solid waste generated by Coachella, Stagecoach and Desert Trip, three flagship festivals of music, love and… good intentions. 1,612 tonnes is a lot, for organisers and artists who say they want to minimise the damage done to the planet.
To ease their conscience at a lower cost, Coachella organisers encourage festival-goers to carpool, recycle and reuse their outfits from one year to the next. But the festival is held each year in the town of Indio, more than a two-hour drive from Los Angeles, for visitors who are more attached to being seen than demonstrating their supposed commitments.
This dismal environmental record also makes us question the sincerity of the artists who perform there. One of the festival’s stars, Billie Eilish, who is very conscious of the environmental impact of her tours, a staunch vegetarian and strongly committed to the fight against climate change, has nevertheless performed several times at Coachella despite the festival’s heavy environmental impact.
Principle of reality, principle of precaution
Just like musicians, festival-goers and some event organisers, we know that consumers do not always do what they say and do not always say what they do. Thus, we can question the craze for factory outlets and organic products, the hunt for low prices coupled with the glorification of products made in Europe, long-haul flights and fair tourism.
There are many examples of this apparent dissociation between stated intentions and objective behaviours, as demonstrated by the impressive success of Shein at a time when sustainable development, reuse and vintage have become sacred.
The Chinese brand, which pushes the concept of fast fashion to the extreme, enjoys undeniable popularity. Its strategy is based on four pillars which completely contradict these current values, although they are not claimed by the brand: competitive prices (Shein is less expensive than the main players in the field, Zara and H&M in the lead), responsiveness (6,000 new references per day at a time of supposed reduction of fashion consumption), marketing (micro-influencers, permanent discounts and reductions, daily notifications) and a total lack of intermediation based on a pure-player approach (drastically reduced production costs).
We need to focus on how the consumer acts rather than what they say.
This spectacular success is still rather surprising when you consider all the downsides of the model: deplorable working conditions, widespread collection of personal data, plagiarism in creations, harmful environmental impact, European de-industrialisation, etc. Shein is emblematic of ultra-fast fashion and has even surpassed Amazon as the most downloaded app in the US. In the midst of the pandemic, the company reportedly increased its sales by 250% to $10 billion in revenue and recorded over 80 million downloads.
A number of contradictions of this type highlight the importance of knowing how to decipher consumption practices and purchasing behaviour, rather than focusing on the consumer’s discourse and supposed predispositions. We need to focus on how the consumer acts rather than what they say.
This being the case, and as professor and philosopher Benoît Heilbrunn rightly suggests, it would be futile to interpret these contradictions as consumer schizophrenia; instead, it is better to accept the chaotic nature of consumption.
Today, we live in a world of frenetic quantification that gives us the illusion that we can model complex, contingent, multifactorial, and even unconscious phenomena through a series of systematic methodologies -classification, measurement, evaluations. Algorithms reinforce the fantasy of quantifying private lives and modelling the individual as if our behaviours and decisions were predictable and systematic. The principle of reality constantly reminds us that the individual remains, fortunately, difficult to put into an equation.
What about the future?
Musicians and festival organisers are by no means the only ones to express false promises or wishful thinking. Politicians, public figures, business leaders and consumers do not always do what they say and do not always say what they do. Far from it.
These patterns can be explained as much by action as by omission: most decision-makers (including consumers) tend to manage this dissonance quietly until it produces damaging results or irreversible consequences.
This systematic denial of discrepancies between intentions, principles, discourse and practices can also be explained by behavioural inertia, habits, intellectual laziness, a lack of initiative or discernment, and the desire to appear better than one really is rather than question actions that are contrary to our stated principles.
While some interpret marketing as blatant deception, others see it as a more subtle device: a tacit compromise by the consumer rather than manipulation.
This dissonance can also be explained by emotional responses, which are more unconscious or less deliberate, and are fuelled by cognitive biases. As many behavioural economists have pointed out, erratic judgements and poor decisions are the rule rather than the exception. Procrastination, ideal representations, denial and prejudice take precedence over rational, well-founded or even substantiated judgement when it comes to recognising mistakes or managing risks.
From a marketing point of view, this is a dialogue of the deaf between the company and its markets, a game of liar’s poker between the protagonists, sometimes deleterious and sometimes more pleasant – in any case, a sort of cleverly designed manipulation of consumers’ daily lives.
While some interpret marketing as blatant deception, others see it as a more subtle device: a tacit compromise by the consumer rather than manipulation. In this perspective, the consumer can also choose an acceptable level of deception and play with this manipulation to make his or her daily life more enjoyable.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article in French.
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