Questions for students:
- What do we mean by postmodernity? What are its major features?
- Please list and explain the major paradoxes related to today's consumption.
- Show how companies and brands develop products and marketing programs to address such paradoxes.
- What do you think of such paradoxes? Are they threatening consumers? Do they really represent a opportunity for companies?
Today’s consumers are a puzzle for economists, marketers and brand managers. Far from taking “rational” decisions and behaving predictably, these consumers stray further and further from traditional models and segmentation. The past twenty years have seen the arrival of a chameleon consumer who is omnivorous and insatiable. Companies and marketing professionals, at first unsettled by these new postmodern patterns of consumption, have now managed to find ways round them thanks to incredible advances in technology. The film documents a number of paradoxes related to current consumption patterns ( i.e., alone and together, real and virtual, fast and slow, nomadic and sedentary, masculine and feminine, producer and consumer, profane and sacred) and analyses them in the light of postmodernity. We aim to show how several firms use these paradoxes to feed their marketing and how a whole series of products and contemporary consumption phenomena have developed around these paradoxes.