SAWANT: Misleading social media marketing causes dangerous overconsumption
Column: Sincerely Rue
The period of time after World War II is known by many as the golden age of consumerism. After an era of war and economic depression was brought to an end by increased reliance on mass spending, the U.S. experienced an increase in jobs, pay and production of consumer goods that many could finally afford again.
Today, consumerism has taken a turn that could very well characterize a second golden age but is distinguished by a very different set of circumstances.
Today, social media and influencers on various platforms have the ability to significantly influence how we live our lives down to the very products we choose to buy. The primary culprit? Influencer marketing.
Companies are slowly realizing that traditional marketing methods no longer appeal to the general public the way they once used to. No one pays any meaningful attention to deliberate marketing efforts spearheaded by the companies themselves because as consumers of the 21st century, we like feeling superior to the drearily corporate promotional efforts to get into our wallets.
Today, many companies are resorting to paying influencers with large enough social media platforms to promote products, to talk about how much they love them and to appeal to their followers who find them charmingly relatable until everyone else feels like they need those products.
When influencers rave about products that start to trend seemingly overnight, we may feel the urge to own the product ourselves. Even if we have no particular need or want for it, the fact that so many other people seem to have it and claim to swear by it is reason enough. Considering the rate at which new products go viral, this leads to overconsumption.
Such social media product influencing creates an endless and seemingly never-ending cycle of buying, using and discarding because trends, as they do, eventually die.
When certain products are phased out and owning them becomes a sign of cultural ineptness, they are discarded to the back of our closets, and we begin accumulating "stuff" — not meaningful items.
This is an especially significant problem when influencers promote many types of the same product, such as different brands of the same makeup product.
Influencers on Instagram may swear up and down that a particular brand has the best concealer, and if consumers are not cautious about what items they choose to purchase, they are left with 10 different brands of the same product in the same shade with the same function that will probably go unused.
Things — not meaningful items — are everywhere. Things we no longer use because we no longer need them. These decisions are based primarily on what social media tells us we should want next and what we should no longer be associated with. Things we perhaps never even needed in the first place.
There is dramatic pressure on consumers to buy, buy, buy. Consume, consume, consume. Every other post on Instagram is a sponsored post based on something you might have recently looked up.
The other day, I was looking at a few sites in search of some new hiking tops, and a few days later, almost every two to three posts on my Instagram feed were sponsored posts from brands suggesting products very similar to those I was browsing.
And even though I was looking for a few new shirts, I received recommendations for new water bottles, shoes, socks, backpacks, blankets and similar items.
Though I needed none of these items, I found myself actually considering buying some of them before I realized I did not even want a new backpack before I saw it in that moment.
I feel that many people encounter a similar experiences on social media, especially on TikTok. Users do not realize they want the Drunk Elephant cream or a Stanley tumbler until they see them, even though they did not even know these products existed 30 seconds ago.
Influencers love to insist that you need a particular product or that a particular item absolutely changed their life. Most of the time, it is not true because these claims are made about so many products and influencers are given a sizeable check to promote them.
Consumers oftentimes do not know any better and are convinced that they do indeed need every product that social media introduces them to, which leads to massive overconsumption.
There is nothing wrong with splurging and buying yourself the things you want. But it is different when social media constantly fuels this consumption to a point where what is truly good in the market and what is not is no longer clear.
Product recommendations have become contingent on their level of popularity online rather than how much value they would actually bring to the consumer’s life.
Consumerism is definitely not what it used to be during the economic depression. Today, the theory of consumerism seems to have taken a life of its own, living in the excessive amount of influencer marketing that seems to breathe down the necks of consumers with every scroll.
Rujuta Sawant is a Rutgers Business School junior majoring in business analytics and information technology and minoring in political science. Her column, "Sincerely Rue," runs on alternate Mondays.
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