domingo, maio 29, 2005: Class Matters - Social Class and Status Markers in the United States of America

Artigo muito interessante sobre a evolução das tendências de consumo e sua relação dinâmica com noções de classe social

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Everyone, meanwhile, appears to be blending into a classless crowd, shedding the showiest kinds of high-status clothes in favor of a jeans-and-sweatsuit informality. When Vice President Dick Cheney, a wealthy man in his own right, attended a January ceremony in Poland to commemorate the liberation of Nazi death camps, he wore a parka.

But status symbols have not disappeared. As luxury has gone down-market, the marketplace has simply gone one better, rolling out ever-pricier goods and pitching them to the ever-loftier rich. This is an America of $130,000 Hummers and $12,000 mother-baby diamond tennis bracelet sets, of $600 jeans, $800 haircuts and slick new magazines advertising $400 bottles of wine.

Then there are the new badges of high-end consumption that may be less readily conspicuous but no less potent. Increasingly, the nation's richest are spending their money on personal services or exclusive experiences and isolating themselves from the masses in ways that go beyond building gated walls.
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Goods and services have always been means to measure social station. Thorstein Veblen, the political economist who coined the phrase "conspicuous consumption" at the beginning of the last century, observed that it was the wealthy "leisure class," in its "manner of life and its standards of worth," that set the bar for everyone else.

"The observance of these standards," Veblen wrote, "in some degree of approximation, becomes incumbent upon all classes lower in the scale."

So it is today. In a recent poll by The New York Times, fully 81 percent of Americans said they had felt social pressure to buy high-priced goods.

But what Veblen could not have foreseen is where some of that pressure is coming from, says Juliet B. Schor, a professor of sociology at Boston College who has written widely on consumer culture. While the rich may have always set the standards, Professor Schor said, the actual social competition used to be played out largely at the neighborhood level, among people in roughly the same class.

In the last 30 years or so, however, she said, as people have become increasingly isolated from their neighbors, a barrage of magazines and television shows celebrating the toys and totems of the rich has fostered a whole new level of desire across class groups. A "horizontal desire," coveting a neighbor's goods, has been replaced by a "vertical desire," coveting the goods of the rich and the powerful seen on television, Professor Schor said.

"The old system was keeping up with the Joneses," she said. "The new system is keeping up with the Gateses."

Of course only other billionaires actually can. Most Americans are staring across a widening income gap between them and the very rich, making such vertical desire all the more unrealistic. "There is a bigger gap between the average person and what they are aspiring to," Professor Schor said.
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Marketers have had to adjust their strategies in this fluid world of consumerism. Where once they pitched advertisements primarily to a core group of customers - men earning $35,000 to $50,000 a year, say - now they are increasingly fine-tuning their efforts, trying to identify potential customers by interests and tastes as well as by income level.

"The market dynamics have changed," said Idris Mootee, a marketing expert based in Boston. "It used to be clearly defined by how much you can afford. Before, if you belonged to a certain group, you shopped at Wal-Mart and bought the cheapest coffee and bought the cheapest sneakers. Now, people may buy the cheapest brand of consumer goods but still want Starbucks coffee and an iPod."

Merchandisers, for example, might look at two golfers, one lower middle class, the other wealthy, and know that they read the same golf magazine, see the same advertisements and possibly buy the same quality driver. The difference is that one will be splurging and then play on a public course while the other will not blink at the price and tee off at a private country club.

Similarly, a middle-income office manager may save her money to buy a single luxury item, like a Chanel jacket, the same one worn by a wealthy homemaker who has a dozen others like it in her $2.5 million house.
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Status among people in the top tier, he said, "is the time spent being waited on, being taken care of in nail salons, and how many people who work for them." From 1997 to 2002, revenues from hair, nail and skin care services jumped by 42 percent nationwide, Census Bureau data shows. Revenues from what the bureau described as "other personal services" increased 74 percent.

Indeed, in some cases, services and experiences have replaced objects as the true symbols of high status. "Anyone can buy a one-off expensive car," said Paul Nunes, who with Brian Johnson wrote "Mass Affluence," a book on marketing strategies. "But it is lifestyle that people are competing on more now. It is which sports camps do your kids go to and how often, which vacations do you take, even how often do you do things like go work for Habitat for Humanity, which is a charitable expense people can compete with."

In the country's largest cities, otherwise prosaic services have been transformed into status symbols simply because of the price tag. In New York last year, one salon introduced an $800 haircut, and a Japanese restaurant, Masa, opened with a $350 prix fixe dinner (excluding tax, tips and beverages). The experience is not just about a good meal, or even an exquisite one; it is about a transformative encounter in a Zen-like setting with a chef who decides what will be eaten and at what pace. And it is finally about exclusivity: there are only 26 seats. Today, one of the most sought-after status symbols in New York is a Masa reservation.

And that is how the marketplace works, Professor Conley says. For every object of desire, another will soon come along to trump it, fueling aspirations even more.

"Class now is really like three-card monte," he said. "The moment the lower-status aspirant thinks he has located the nut under the shell, it has actually shifted, and he is too late. "
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New York Times

Mass Affluence

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