Political Product Placement: Consumerism’s Command on Campaign Culture
Consumerism, characterized by a tendency to be at the forefront of acquiring and consuming goods and services, has become one of the defining features of American culture. This consumerist mentality has spilled out of the marketplace over the years, increasingly influencing political behavior and campaign politics. Most recently, the nexus between consumerism and politics has become ostentatiously apparent in U.S. Presidential elections, where political candidates are seemingly marketed and branded like consumer products.
In the United States, however, its very foundations can be traced back to the economic boom following World War II, a time of unprecedented growth in both production and consumption. This period turned consumerism into an intrinsic part of the American Dream, wherein material success and wealth accumulation were essential signs of both individual and societal progress. It changed American culture in a big way by infusing consumerism in people’s values, zealously putting forward that happiness and prosperity were achievable via consumption.
The impact of consumerism on political behavior is evident in how voters interact with political campaigns. Just as consumers would get attracted to a marketplace, so are voters by branding, marketing, and commodification of their choices. Political campaigns have gradually started adopting practices from the commercial world and advanced marketing techniques to connect with the targeted voter demographics.
Candidates are often packaged in ways that emphasize their charisma, creating a commodity personality that voters can easily relate to. Consumerism in politics is widely apparent in the emphasis on attracting people with catchy slogans, tantalizing merchandise, and appropriately targeted advertisements to invent a most convincing, palatable candidate identity.
The recent U.S. Presidential elections have been witnesses to this growing power in the political context. Campaign strategies have started mirroring marketing campaigns, focusing much on branding, digital engagement, and using social media to reach voters. Both political ads and merchandise, for example, were fabricated and geared to impress specific demographics, often using data analytics to make certain messages personal for targeted voters. Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok have been a defining factor in public opinion, as campaigns use such channels to communicate directly with voters in much the same way that consumer brands reach out to their customers and engage with them in a like manner. Indeed, scholars have recorded how personalization and commodification of politicians can result in vote choice, sometimes tilting candidate image over substance.
With consumerism, this has come to dominate political decisions as much as other elements that drive consumer behavior do. Similar to the consumer, voters are more and more attracted to those candidates who best reflect their values or foster some sense of identity with them. Consumerism can, therefore, lead to a simplification of complex political ideologies into easily digestible, sellable ideas. This is best epitomized by the recent elections where political campaigns move towards nothing more than slogans, hashtags, and branded merchandise that awaken the ‘consumer instinct’ in voters. This phenomenon was strikingly explicit at many times during the election when this branding and presentation were going more to shape voter preference than any deeper discussion of policies.
Recent Trends in Kamala Harris’ Political Campaigning Kamala Harris’s political campaign has been quick to grasp the new currents in digital and social media engagement in an attempt to secure a rapport with young voters. One such example is the popular TikTok challenge where Harris’s iconic line from one of her speeches “Do you think you fell out of a coconut tree?” went viral and was further remixed a dozen different times. This trend testifies to how, through the use of humor and relatability, her campaign can use those very platforms that engage youth to galvanize audiences.
Moreover, Harris’s campaign has benefited from social media endorsements—specifically, the very controversial “brat” endorsement by Charli XCX after the recent “brat summer” that’s overtaken social media by storm. These reflect a broader trend in political campaigning, whereby the influence of social media personalities is exploited as a means to reach audiences that tend to engage more with content online.
The concept elucidates the junction between consumerism and politics, showing how the branding and marketing of political candidates borrow more and more from strategies used in consumer advertising.
This growing trend of consumerism in politics has its critics. Scholars and concerned commentators point out that treating politics like a marketplace undercuts democracy by reducing civic engagement to a transactional activity no different from shopping. Such an emphasis on branding and image, at the expense of meaningful policy discussions, can lead to a less informed electorate in which voters find themselves swayed more by the veneer of candidates’ marketability than their actual capacity to govern effectively. This emerging trend gives cause for concern regarding the future of democratic engagement, as the lines that demarcate consumer behavior from political participation increasingly start to blur.
The influence of consumerism on U.S. politics, especially evident in recent Presidential elections, illustrates a wider transition towards a market-driven methodology in political campaigning. As political candidates are increasingly presented as if they were consumer products, the way voters engage is evolving, with image and branding taking on an ever more pivotal role in determining electoral results. While this is a trend that has opened politics up to people once sidelined from the process, it raises problems of its own for democratic integrity. How to blend the demands of the consumerist society with the need for informed and substantive political engagement is what, in many ways, will become a major challenge.
