Kids & Cul-De-Sacs: Census 2000 and the Reproduction of Consumer Culture
50 Pages Posted: 22 Aug 2001
Abstract
Over the years, the census has provoked a number of social, political, and economic controversies. Little attention, however, has been given to the role of the census in fostering the creation and maintenance of markets for consumer goods. This Review takes an inquisitive tour through the 2000 Census on Population and Housing, focusing especially on its role as the statistical foundation of marketing efforts by retail firms. The underlying motivation for the project is a suspicion that, at least if the consumer product industry's own words before Congress are to be believed, the decennial census confers a significant positive externality (some might say a hidden subsidy) on retail and marketing firms. Combined with the multi-billion dollar "private sociology" of retail and marketing firms, the census data are transformed by marketers into nuanced descriptions of identifiable and predictable consumer lifestyles, motivations, and behaviors. These descriptions allow product manufacturers and retailers to define and access numerous consumer substrata within the population at large, providing an indispensable aid in the design of consumer goods and accompanying promotional materials.
In addition to providing a descriptive account of the population census and its various uses by commercial entities, this Review also attempts to provide a framework for determining whether more serious normative consideration of the census marketing externality is merited. It does so by outlining models of consumer sovereignty and consumer susceptibility that have dominated legal and academic treatments of consumer behavior, and by arguing that neither model adequately accounts for the cultural implications of consumption. As a consequence, neither model provides a complete account of the impact of census-based marketing. In contrast, this Review argues that a more textured, cultural understanding of consumption and its accompaniments might help determine whether the marketers' use of census data is designed to be informative and responsive, invasive and exploitative, or something else altogether.
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