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[Extract from my earlier paper, The Intangible Revolution]Merriam Webster's Dictionary defines the term yuppie as:

Function: noun
Usage: often capitalised
Etymology: probably from young urban professional + -ie
Date: 1983
: a young college-educated adult who is employed in a well-paying profession and who lives and works in or near a large city

There’s nothing remarkable about this definition. Everybody knows what a yuppie is, everyone is able to parody yuppie aspirations by listing the brands, products and activities that they most enjoy.

What perhaps is remarkable is the fact that yuppie is in the dictionary at all. Together with our every day experience of the language of consumerism, it serves as evidence that one’s identity within a particular segmentation model can move from being merely descriptive to actually prescribing a set of attitudes and related purchasing behaviour. Along with Conservative, Socialist, German, Japanese, Catholic, Hindu, gay and straight, yuppie – once a segment description in a consumer segmentation model – entered our culture as a possible identity to be worn or disparaged among all those others.

It would be very dangerous to underestimate the degree of complicity, joy, and often irony that people bring to establishing their own identities as consumers. People are no longer easily defined by social class, family or political affiliation. It is now about creating and expressing an identity and a sense of belonging through what we buy. We enjoy living in and speaking from our own particular ‘consumer’ segments. Once you know you’re a yuppie, you define your patterns of consumption in relation to that identity. You can try to escape or subvert, or you just become more of a yuppie than before. We understand, define, and articulate their social identity, values, beliefs, aspirations and affiliations through our assemblage of brands.



Two important social and cultural trends relate to this. Firstly, it appears that consumerism and identifying oneself primarily as a consumer is supplanting other modes of identity, particularly those to do with religion and politics. Politics, in particular, now borrows from the language of consumerist economics (i.e. market forces, purchasers and providers, hotlines, 'rebranding Britain').



Conversely, consumerism is increasingly recognised as fulfilling many of the social and cultural roles of religious, political and national identity. Rituals of atonement, sacrament, totemism, and fetishism are all encoded the growing markets for self-help, recycling, theme shops and designer apparel. The apparently universal human habit of imparting culturally symbolic meaning to certain objects and behaviours is found in consumerism just as it is in all other modes of social behaviour. As consumerism becomes effectively the dominant ideology of a society, it goes on to define the culture in which it operates.