Role of Advertisement in Formation of the Consumer Society in Countries that Conducted Economic Reforms

Permanent growth of attention of the scientific society to the problems of excessive consumption, exhaustion of resources, load on environment and the necessity of transition to the stable balanced development determines urgency of study of the consumer society phenomenon. Of special interest are post-socialistic countries, which performed transition from administrative to proto-market economy in a short period of time. The goal of the article is to study specific features of formation of components of the consumer society in post-socialistic countries and to reveal factors that determine the rate and direction of this process. The article takes positions of unification of economic, sociologic and philosophic approaches on the basis of the methods of historic analysis and synthesis in order to prove that the phenomenon of the post-socialistic countries is an unusual rate of transformation of the mass consciousness of the population from condemnation of consumption to its idealisation. The article determines a list of positive and negative economic components of the consumer society and provides analysis of their presence in the countries that conducted economic reforms. It develops a set of psychological components of the consumer society and its availability in consciousness of the population of such countries. It proposes and proves a hypothesis that replacement of both consumption models and consumption value in consciousness of the population of post-socialistic countries was conducted mainly with the help of advertisement. The article outlines the process of transformation of the object of psychological trust from the Soviet propaganda to market advertisement.