Political Ideology in Consumer Resistance: Analyzing Far-Right Opposition to Multicultural Marketing

Sofia Ulver,Christofer Laurell

doi:10.1177/0743915620947083

Abstract

Political ideologies of the far-right are gaining ground in world politics and culture, not least by way of market forces. It has therefore become urgent to understand how these ideologies manifest themselves in the fields of marketing and consumption at a sociocultural level. The authors explore the discursive efforts in far-right consumer resistance to advance a political agenda through protests directed at brands’ multicultural advertising and analyze how these consumers conceptualize their adversaries in the marketplace. In contrast to previous framings of adversaries identified in consumer research, where resistance is typically anticapitalist and directed toward firms’ unethical conduct or the exploitation by the global market economy per se, the authors find that the following discursive themes stand out in the far-right consumer resistance: the emphasis on the state as main antagonist, the indifference to capitalism as a potential adversary, and overt contestation of liberal ethics. The article concludes with a discussion of research contributions as well as the public policy and marketing implications in light of a growing far-right consumer culture.

Highlights

Political ideologies of the far-right are gaining ground in world politics and culture, not least by way of market forces
In contrast to the majority of previous research on consumer resistance, we find that the resisting consumers in our research construct market actors as adversaries by portraying them as betraying the free capitalist logic for the benefit of politics, rather than as greed-based “Machiavellian” capitalists (e.g., Kozinets and Handelman 2004)
Private capitalism is the system to defend, not defeat. This despite the historical fascist legacy of the popularized far right, which did not include free capitalism in its authoritarian vision of civilization but, more precisely, a state-controlled economy (Blamires and Jackson 2006), a state capitalism paradoxically denounced in our data

Summary

Introduction

Political ideologies of the far-right are gaining ground in world politics and culture, not least by way of market forces. This tweet, addressed to the multinational telecom company Telia, is an apt illustration of how advertising is used as an important venue for consumers’ political commentary and resistance, but it is an eloquent articulation of an increasingly visible kind of movement: consumer resistance resting on far-right ideologies. While such ideologies are rapidly gaining ground in world politics and culture (Berman 2019), not least by way of market forces (Krastev and Holmes 2019; MillerIdriss 2017), it is important to understand how these ideologies manifest themselves in the field of marketing at a sociocultural level. The function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel

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