vienna

Ever since Douglas and Isherwood pointed out that consumption
is a ritual process, marketing theorists have tried to make this insight
fruitful for their activities.
“To manage without rituals is to manage without clear meanings and
possibly without memories. Some are purely verbal rituals, vocalised,
unrecorded, but they fade on the air and hardly help to limit the
interpretative scope. More effective rituals use material things, and
the more costly the ritual trappings, the stronger we can assume
the intention to fix the meanings to be. Goods, in this perspective,
are ritual adjuncts, consumption is a ritual process whose primary
function is to make sense of the inchoate flux of events.” 499
Instead of developing greater consciousness in producing and
nurturing this social practice with social responsibility, marketing tried
to misuse the concept of ritual power solely for its own economic
goals. Rituals became the new weapons of marketing, whereby consumers
were not only to buy and consume, but also to enact a ritual.
The proclaimed collapse of religion is to be compensated by ritualising
the consumption process. Consuming was the new religion, which
welcomed the advent of the “primitive” as an alternative to the
more and more abstract world we live in. And consuming needed
new rituals, of course with ritual power in the production sector.
The brand community was to be held together by means of rituals.
Bolz and Bosshart articulated all this and dreamed the following
marketing scenario:
“When we think to the end the demands of rituals, it is easy to see
that it is possible to enforce ritualisation with even tougher means.
In this way, one could achieve a kind of dependence which is very
difficult to overcome or not at all.“ 500
It is sheer madness to want to produce consumer junkies, who
are possibly hooked to a particular brand. While Simmel feared
that the consumer could become a slave to the trend industry, to the
fashion industry in particular, Bolz and Bosshart go a step further. The
relation of master and slave is replaced by the relation of dealer
and junky. Both concepts are frightening. Here, Miller’s notion of
consumption as a sacrificial act of devotion undergoes a primitive
499 Douglas/Isherwood (2002:43).
500 Bolz/Bosshart (1995:260)*.
198