History of the Centre for Consumer Society Research

The Centre for Consumer Society Research – from a state research institute to an academic research unit.

The first consumer advisory committee was established by the Finnish government in 1962. At its launch, the committee commissioned an extensive survey aimed at investigating consumers’ views on the quality, prices and sales methods of goods as well as providing consumer advice. Government official Olavi Väyrynen, one of the fathers of consumer policy, summed up the key findings as follows: the Finnish consumer is “helpless, passive and immature. – – The price-consciousness of Finns was utterly poor.”

According to Väyrynen, Finns were “backward”. Words reflecting the Finnish national character were “sluggishness, hard-headedness and introversion”. This is why Finns would rather adapt to market forces than start scrapping with shopkeepers. The reason for this was an old-fashioned consumer education: “Over decades, our school system has succeeded in making us uninformed in terms of economic policy and society. Our economic mythology based on folk tradition has usually only produced idealistic local area tourists and innocent guardians of old-time tradition.”

“In the case of households, the nature of education in my opinion adheres to traditional values and strives for the family idyll found in a primer, while consumer policy is critical and concerned about the problems of industrialised society. – – Instead of asking where they are being led, tomorrow’s consumers want to go somewhere. This is why educating competent consumers and teaching them appropriate consumption are among the most important tasks of today.”

In the 1960s and 1970s, the aim was to protect Finnish consumers, squeezed between large companies and the private sector, from poor products, excessive prices and inappropriate information. In terms of consumer education, this meant providing impartial knowledge as a counterweight to persuasive information churned out through aggressive advertising.

An important achievement in consumer policy in the 1970s was the introduction of consumer protection legislation in 1978. Consumer administration was reformed at the turn of the 1990s. The National Board of Trade and Consumer Affairs, which oversaw the field for a long time, was dissolved, and the National Food Administration and National Consumer Administration (also known as the Finnish Consumer Agency) as well as the Consumer Research Centre were established alongside the existing Office of the Consumer Ombudsman and Consumer Complaints Board.

In the final result, consumer research was the only genuinely new governmental operation. The staff was acquired by merging the Centre for Home Economics with the price research agency of the National Board of Trade and Consumer Affairs. The former was originally established in 1941 for educational purposes, and its name was changed in 1972 to the Research Centre for Home Economics and Consumer Affairs. Underlying the change was economic deregulation in the late 1980s, which included a shift from the regulation of the telecommunications sector, energy sector and the financial market to the liberalisation of the market. The first director of the Consumer Research Centre, which was launched as a state research institute, was Eila Kilpiö, Licentiate of Science (Agriculture and Forestry). From the beginning, the research centre also had a board appointed by the Ministry of Trade and Industry.

In other words, the roots of the Centre for Consumer Society Research were not only in the price control of the National Board of Trade and Consumer Affairs, but also in home economics research. The Centre for Home Economics was established in September 1941 under the direction of the Martha Organization for the “professional development of home economics” through educational efforts. The Centre for Home Economics published guidebooks for coping with austerity, organised educational events and produced shadow-image series. Gradually, experiments on food and household products were initiated. To begin with, research in the 1950s focused on, for example, preservation, detergents and the vitamin content of nutrients. Later, the scope was expanded to encompass homes, social issues, and product testing and comparison. From the 1950s, the cooperation committee for industry and home economics also operated under the auspices of the Centre for Home Economics, with members appointed by the Federation of Finnish Industries, which was tasked with cooperation between housewives and the household product industry.

In the early days, the Consumer Research Centre had three offices: the price agency composed of employees of the dissolved National Board of Trade and Consumer Affairs, the commodity research agency that carried out research on the quality of goods together with TTS Research, as well as the consumer research agency where consumers’ coping in the market was a key focus. Only a limited amount of academic research was conducted. Commissioned research was carried out for planning social security, among other things. In price research, much attention was paid on what are known as pricing structure surveys, which were based on the statutory disclosure obligation of businesses. One key development challenge was the recruitment of doctoral graduates specialising in consumer research. The number of doctoral theses produced at the centre was high in the 1990s, and many of the graduates now serve as professors. In 2015, the Consumer Research Centre was incorporated into the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki, where it continues to operate as the Centre for Consumer Society Research.