“Conflict Market” Research Article

Here you can read my first introduction of the ‘Conflict Market’ as a notion published in Journal of Consumer Culture 2022. The abstract reads:

“At the beginning of the millennium, consumer culture researchers predicted that people
would increasingly demand that marketplace actors subscribe to contemporary ethics of
liberal democracy. Although their prediction indeed came true, they did not foresee that
an algorithm-powered media ecosystem in combination with growing authoritarian
movements would soon come to fuel an increasingly polarized political landscape and
challenge the very fundament of liberal democracy per se. In this macroscopic, conceptual
article, I discuss three assumption-challenging logics—counter-democratic consumer
culture, de-dialectical algorithmic manipulation, and growing illiberal consumer
resistance—according to which the market increasingly monetizes the conflicts accompanying
this polarization and, thereby, reinforces it. I call this new logic a conflict
market and illustrate it through three, historically situated and currently conflicting,
consumer ideoscapes—the neoblue, the neogreen, and the neobrown—between which
consumers engage in marketized conflicts, not in a de-politicizing way, but in an increasingly
un-politicizing, de-dialectical, and polarizing way. At the technologically manipulated
conflict market, the role of marketers is to monetize politically sensitive topics
by creating conflict, knowingly renouncing large groups of consumers, and giving fodder
to the political extremes.”

The Era of Conflicting Megatrends, Property Expo, Gothenburg, Sep 2018

In this presentation I talk to large real estate companies, investors, politicians and retailers about conflicting megatrends in society  that influence the way we live, consume, produce, innovate (and vote!). I frame the most central conflicting logics as Trust Economy vs. Attention Economy.

“The Future Political Role of Brands” Kindred Group Summit, Milan, Italy, May 2018

What responsibility does a brand have in the larger society? How can brands in historically stigmatized and “problematic” industries (such as gambling) think of their own existence, and navigate in an increasingly critical but also addicted consumer society?

Keynote at “Is there a Future for the Future?”, New York, USA, May 2016

For the second year I was invited to speak as keynote at the Swedish-American Executive Women’s Forum. 2016 the theme is “Is there a Future for the Future?” and I spoke about where we were, are, and are heading in terms of gender in consumer society. Other co-speakers were  Jay Newton-Small (TIME journalist and author),  Anna Kinberg Batra ( leader Sweden’s Moderate Party), Adiba Barney (CEO, Silicon Valey Forum) and Linda Björk (author and speaker).  Arranged by the Swedish-American Chamber of Commerce, and hosted by PwC, New York.

Link:

Swedish-American Executive Women's Forum