Consumer Anxiety

Consumer anxiety refers to the theory that personal consumption can sometimes provoke anxiety for an individual because of the perception that others will judge his or her consumption choices negatively. The existence of consumer anxiety is premised on the concern that one's publicly visible and personally identifiable consumer practices, such as styles of dress, adornment, hairstyles, or living spaces, are open to judgment by others. While the theory rests on processes of judgment or evaluation in the context of individual and group interactions, it also unites the visual, aesthetic, and moral dimensions of social life. The possibility of consumer anxiety is also a reflection of larger scale, background, cultural processes.

From a theoretical perspective, the essence of the theory is that in consumer societies, the proliferation of consumer choice leads to uncertainty about the nature of a socially correct choice and the related fear that others may negatively judge an individual on the basis of the consumer choices he or she makes. The thematic core of the theory can be found in a variety of key texts in classical and contemporary theories on social change, consumption, and lifestyle, and especially in the work of Zygmunt Bauman and Anthony Giddens. The concept was brought to recent prominence as a contemporary problem in consumption studies in a key article by Alan Warde and an empirical follow-up by Ian Woodward. Within business and marketing studies, the existence of risk as an element of consumer behavior has been acknowledged for somewhat longer, though in this field it is more frequently conceptualized through psychological models of behavior (Taylor 1974; Bauer 1960).

The existence of consumer anxiety is a result of the interplay of both social and individual processes. According to the theory, consumption can be a type of social risk, whereby one's social status may be challenged or eroded because of negative judgments others make about the things one consumes or the way one consumers them. These negative judgments may also lead to relatively minor or transient types of psychological pain, such as self-doubt, loss of self-esteem, or embarrassment. For example, individuals may be sanctioned because they are judged as wearing the wrong color to a particular social setting, such as a funeral, or because they show too much of their body relative to what might be considered generally appropriate in certain social settings. Consumer anxiety may also arise from the economic implications of one's consumption habits, such as personal overspending, or from the morally evaluated dimensions of one's personal consumption, such as perceived greed, or the environmental consequences of personal consumption choices.

Within the domain of consumption, which is to some degree based on matters of aesthetics, personal taste, knowledge, and expertise and skills of judgment, it is possible to identify how anxiety could come to be played out in a range of fields of consumption. Consumption choices, styles, and possible tastes have multiplied exponentially and change their characteristics and meanings rapidly to the extent that keeping up is difficult. On the face of it, there are few authorities to consult on such choices that can be seen by individuals, after all, as matters of individual taste. In this context, it is worth revisiting Bauman's observation on the dilemma associated [Page 234]with freedom in postmodernity as it perfectly captures the uncertainties individuals may face in relation to such choices—“It means the exhilarating freedom to pursue anything and the mind-boggling uncertainty as to what is worth pursuing and in the name of what one should pursue it” (Bauman 1992, vii).

...