Foreshadowing consumer resilience: the mainstreaming of consumer prepping

Kerrane, Benedict ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2114-5965 (2025) Foreshadowing consumer resilience: the mainstreaming of consumer prepping. Journal of Marketing Management, 41 (11-12). pp. 1270-1278. ISSN 0267-257X

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Abstract

This commentary extends the concept of consumer resilience by exploring the everyday prepping practices of mothers from the United Kingdom who accumulate and manage consumer goods to buffer against future crises. Unlike masculinist portrayals of prepping, these practices reflect a maternal ethic of care and pragmatism. Drawing on sociological theories of risk and agency, this commentary demonstrates how consumers engage in temporally embedded actions to restore ontological security amid conditions of ‘permacrisis’. A critique of neoliberal discourses that responsibilise individuals while obscuring structural inequalities that limit access to resilience-building is also offered. Finally, calls for marketing scholars to examine the normalisation and unintended consequences of prepping, and to explore more relational and community-oriented forms of consumer resilience in the face of systemic risk, are made.