Metaconsumer
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 One who actively shapes the products that they purchase.
"Some of the implications of the entrenchment of the metaconsumer in the era of postmodernity have been-recently recognized in the field of consumer research by researchers who are at the forefront of major leaps in methodological and theoretical movements in this field."
- 2 One who consumes or seeks out aspects of consumerism; a consumer of the experience of shopping and advertising (as opposed to the products bought).
"A metaconsumer is not only a consumer of products and symbols but also an active participant in the shopping spectacle."
- 3 A person, system, or organization that purchases something on behalf of a group of consumers.
"Most of these examples assume one producer and one consumer ( or aggregate them into one metaproducer and one metaconsumer ) ."
- 4 One who consumes (destroys) the act or possibility of consumption.
"If it is possible thus to shift from a generically female consumer to a uniquely male metaconsumer (whose slaughter of the too-desirable peacocks would, however vainly, mark an all-consuming end of consumption itself) , this possibility has everything to do with the trick whereby Thackeray stages his consumption so that its feminizing—in a context of male rivalry, effectively homosexualizing—voractity gets transmuted into the distinguished distance, or the killing melancholic disavowal, constitutive, as Judith Butler has argued, of male heterosexuality itself."
Example
More examples"Some of the implications of the entrenchment of the metaconsumer in the era of postmodernity have been-recently recognized in the field of consumer research by researchers who are at the forefront of major leaps in methodological and theoretical movements in this field."
Etymology
From meta- + consumer.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.