8 minute read
Your consumption shows who you are.
Enchanted by consumption
Text: Eva Lundgren Photo: Johan Wingborg
A black and white Fender Stratocaster is leaning against the wall in a room at the top of the Department of Business Administration. The room belongs to Benjamin Hartmann, recently appointed Professor of Business Administration, who researches nostalgia and consumption, among other things. – For me, the Stratocaster has special value and I will never sell it. It was my first electric guitar, bought in Berlin in 1991.
If you put the stylus onto an LP from 1963 and marvel at the wonderful sound, or put your finger in the dial of an old-fashioned telephone and revel in that solution, then you may have suffered from nostalgic enchantment. At least that is what Benjamin Hartmann thinks. – Maybe you think that you bought the things because they reminded you of your childhood? But there are also strong commercial forces that make you want to relive the past with the help of all sorts of items.
Nostalgia is an important driving force behind consumption, whether you are looking for authentic vintage items or newly made retro objects that look old, says Benjamin Hartmann. – Nostalgic consumption creates a kind of enchantment in predominantly three ways: partly there are people who simply think it is fun to wear an old East German military jacket, for example, and partly there are people who want to cleave to the past because they think that things were better then. But it is the third type of nostalgia that interests me the most: when you look back to gain inspiration for the future. For example, in the past, people were much better at reusing and repairing broken objects, and perhaps we should do the same today?
Benjamin Hartmann also engages in nostalgic consumption. He collects electric guitars, for example, and has a Hagstrom guitar, a Viking Deluxe, the same one as Elvis and Frank Zappa played. – Hagstrom went bankrupt in 1983 but the brand lives on, and the guitars are manufactured under licence in Asia. So my guitar is unfortunately not the old Swedish-made model, but still made according to the old drawings.
Benjamin Hartmann's interest in nostalgia may be related to his upbringing.
He was born in 1981 in West Berlin, an enclave in the middle of an East Germany that no longer exists. A 156-kilometre-long wall stretched around West Berlin, of which 44 kilometres went straight through the city. The wall was built in 1961, but on November 9, 1989, the border was suddenly opened. – I grew up just a couple of hundred metres from the wall and still remember what it was like when loads of East Germans were able to stream in. They got 100 Deutschmarks each to buy goods and quickly bought up all the groceries. People from the West could also cross to the other side, on to streets that were previously inaccessible and that we had always wondered about. I also remember the so-called Todesstreifen, a mined
no-man's land, which, after the wall was demolished in 1990, became a giant playground for us children.
The fact that Benjamin Hartmann started studying marketing is partly due to the fact that he has always been interested in advertising. – When we watched television, I did not care so much about the film itself, but used to channel surf to find the commercials instead. But my interest in marketing is also due to the fact that since my school days, I have been fascinated by human behaviour. However, my main interest has always been music. When I got home from school, I would throw my bag in a corner and sit down to practise for three hours. I was also part of a rock band that actually came fifth in a competition in Berlin and I had some plans for a career in music. But then I thought that it would be more fun to have music as a hobby instead.
After upper-secondary school, Benjamin Hartmann did eleven months of civic service instead of military service. This meant helping the elderly in variety of ways, for example by driving them to the hairdresser’s or carrying them in a wheelchair up the stairs. – That period gave me time to think. I had already been accepted to law school but realized that my interest in people and advertising might rather point me towards marketing. So I started studying business in Berlin. In 2005–2006, I was in Lund and did my master's degree in International Marketing and Brand Management. My studies in Germany had mainly been quantitative, and as a student I had taught statistics at Technische Universität Berlin. But in Sweden I encountered a more qualitative approach and it fascinated me more. So after a while, when we were back in Berlin, both myself and my wife Berit became doctoral students at Jönköping International Business School. We moved from a city that had 3.5 million inhabitants with cafés, restaurants and a great cultural life to the little town of Gränna – and really enjoyed it! I defended my dissertation in December 2013, Berit a month later, and in 2015 we both got jobs at the School of Business, Economics and Law here in Gothenburg.
Nostalgic consumption is everywhere, not least in Germany, says Benjamin Hartmann. – After the initial euphoria of reunification, many people missed East Germany. It was believed that there was a sense of solidarity in the midst of the constant queuing for goods, and, furthermore, in the East everyone had jobs. The state-owned East German companies had been sold for practically nothing, but eventually people began to want the very goods that had disappeared. East German beer, sausages and mustard became a way to signify one's origins.
Young people have also started to find East Germany exciting; it has become popular to stay in hotels from 1970s East German, for instance. – It is an example of how you can have nostalgic feelings even for things you have not experienced. Sometimes an entire society can be affected by, for example, Wild West nostalgia or the longing to go back to the time before the First World War, even though no living person was alive at the time. But precisely because we do not know much about life in earlier periods of history, we can fill these epochs with our own fantasies, thoughts and ideas, which make life more interesting.
Consumption is a way of showing who you are, Benjamin Hartmann points out. – Man is a pack animal that still wants to be an individual. We buy vintage clothes or become punks to stand out from the crowd but still belong to a group. And the symbolic meaning of consumption is extremely powerful. Personally, I am of the opinion that I belong to the group of responsible consumers, but sometimes our self-perception can be wrong. Some time ago I was in Denmark, and during lunch some colleagues were discussing how much water their dishwashers consumed. For me, it was a little embarrassing to admit that I did not know exactly how many litres of water my dishwasher uses.
Consumption is identified as a problem, both in terms of the climate, the environment and inequality in the world. But consumption is also often seen as the solution; it is important to choose goods that are labelled Fair Trade, energy-efficient and environmentally friendly.
– And we consumers have a lot of power, we can stop buying T-shirts for 30 krona from Bangladesh. But ethical consumption also has a social dimension; not everyone can afford the more expensive Fair-Trade goods.
How a brand is perceived depends on a kind of negotiation between the producer and the consumer, over which the company only has partial control. Sometimes things can go wrong. Failed business ideas are
another area that Benjamin Hartmann is interested in. – One example is the disposable DVD where the content would disappear after 48 hours, which was launched twenty years ago but was not a success. Another is the lasagna, made by Colgate, which no one wanted because the company is so strongly associated with toothpaste. This example is particularly interesting as it is used so often, but we do not really know if that lasagna really existed or if it is a “fake failure.” We can laugh at these failures but should probably also try to learn from them. In several countries, “fuckup nights” are held, i.e. events where people talk about things that have gone wrong in their lives, and it is a way of helping others not to make the same mistake.
Music is still one of Benjamin Hartmann's greatest hobbies. When he visits relatives in Berlin, he often takes the opportunity to play with his old friends in the band. – Together with Jacob Östberg at Stockholm University, I have also investigated how music can be used in disseminating research results. Because just as images or video clips can increase the understanding of a text, music can convey a feeling or a mood. One example is a song written by Chris Hackley, Professor of Marketing at the University of London, called CCT Blues, which provides a somewhat ingenious explanation of consumer research. Jacob and I both wrote an article about that song and made a heavy metal cover version of it. Because it should be fun to do research!
Benjamin Julien Hartmann
Currently: Recently appointed Professor in Business Administration specializing in Marketing Family: His wife, Berit Hartmann, is a senior lecturer at the Department of Business Administration. They have two children aged 11 and 8. What was the last book you read? The Empty Throne by Bernard Cornwell. What was the last film you watched? The Lighthouse. Hobbies: Tennis, snowboarding, mountain
