Re "A New Way to Ask, 'How Green Is My Conscience?' " (June 25), which described consumers' purchase of environmental offsets, to make up for the pollution caused by the events of everyday life: As the article said, the challenge for consumers wishing to reduce their "carbon footprint" is to understand how much their dollars help the environment.
"People were quite discriminating and quite punitive," says Desmond O'Rourke, an economist who has studied apple marketing for four decades, describing consumer studies done at the time.
M is for masstige -- a term combining mass and prestige and describing consumer products that are comparatively low-priced with a prestigious brand name.
Kingfisher, a home improvement retailer, joined other retailers in March in describing consumer demand as weak and raising concerns about the outlook for the year.
It isn't sly, like the Pepsi "Choice of a New Generation" ads so masterfully skewered by David Foster Wallace, or reactionary or appropriationist, as Thomas Frank describes consumer culture in "The Conquest of Cool".
Grant McCracken, an author, anthropologist and consultant, takes a broader view, describing consumer involvement as a kind of branding Reformation: marketing professionals used to be the high-priest gatekeepers, but now we can all have a direct relationship with the Almighty Brand.
In this sense, neuroeconomics could help to better describe consumer behaviour [8, 9].
However, alternative functions might be more appropriate to describe consumer surplus as discussed by Skiera (1999) and Albers and Skiera (2006).
Alex Abey, the VP of business development for Lookout, describes consumer awareness of mobile security as still "emerging, although it is increasing over time".
