Consumerism and Beyond: Research Perspectives on the Future Social Environment

This report is the proceedings of a conference held on April 14-17, 1982, that WQS presented by the Marketing Science Institute and the Center for Business and Public Policy of the University of Maryland, with the sponsorship of Cheseborough-Pond's Inc.

The conference's purpose was to generate new insights about how consumerism and other elements of the social environment might evolve in the future. In recent times, the social environment in which business firms and their marketing managers must operate has been characterized by great turbulence. The consumer movement, the environmental movement, and other forces have helped to create external pressures on business firms that many managers have found difficult to anticipate, understand, and cope with in a profitable manner. Changes in the political environment are also bound to affect consumerism and business. Which activist organizations will be strong and which ones will be weak? What issues will be most hotly debated? How will (and should) business firms respond?

It was hoped that answers to questions such as these could be obtained by bringing together Q diverse group of experts for three days of focused debate and discussion. Conference presenters included business executives, government officials, consumer activists, journalists, futurists, and academics from the fields of marketing, consumer economics, business and society, and sociology, all contributing their own perspective on the issues.

The group of 30 papers contained in this volume should be of great interest to managers seeking to deal more effectively with future external challenges, particularly those challenges emanating from the consumer movement. These papers should also be of great interest to public policy makers, consumer activists, journalists, and others who have reasons to want to understand where consumerism and other components of the social environment may be headed in the coming years.

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