Author: Kassandra Lippincott
Subtle, Not Silent: What France Taught Me About Consumer Culture
Living in France for the past few months has provided the opportunity to better understand European consumer culture. Unlike in America, where advertisements are shoved in your face everywhere, the French, specifically, do things differently.
Their marketing is subtle, classy. Full of emotive messaging rather than a suggestive demand for purchase.
And what’s interesting isn’t that French companies are somehow “less capitalist” or morally superior. It’s that they seem to understand something that American marketing often ignores: people don’t need what you’re offering. So instead of forcing the product into someone’s life, you weave a story around it and let them decide whether they want to step inside.
It’s persuasion, yes. But it’s persuasion that tries to look like restraint.
In America, ads feel like someone grabbing your chin and turning your head toward the thing you must want. Billboards the size of buildings. Pop-ups stacked on pop-ups. A thousand micro-demands throughout the day that all translate to the same message: Buy this, click that, you’re behind, you’re lacking, you’re missing something.
Here, the approach feels… quieter. Not absent or pure, just quieter.
Part of it is the aesthetic. French branding often leans into simplicity, clean typography, negative space, and a kind of visual confidence that doesn’t need to scream. But it’s more than design; the tone is different. It’s less “you need this now” and more “this could be part of a life you’d like.” Less urgency and more implications.
It’s not that French advertising doesn’t sell desire; of course it does. But the desire is dressed up as identity, memory, ritual, and beauty. The pitch is rarely blunt, and the goal is still to guide you toward a purchase, but it’s done with the illusion of dignity intact.
And I don’t say “illusion” as an insult. I mean it literally: the marketing is designed to feel like choice, not pressure.
That difference matters. Not just emotionally, but culturally.
Because when a society constantly pressures people to buy, upgrade, chase, and prove, it produces a perpetually unsatisfied consumer. But when the pressure is quieter, the consumer experience shifts too. You still participate, but you’re not being assaulted every ten seconds by the reminder that you’re not enough without a product.
Of course, not all of this is cultural preference. Some of it is structure.
The European Union has long had consumer-protection frameworks that explicitly regulate misleading and aggressive commercial practices. The EU’s Unfair Commercial Practices Directive (2005/29/EC) aims to curb marketing that manipulates consumers through deception or undue pressure, including “aggressive” practices that materially impair consumer choice.
And in France specifically, advertising is shaped not only by law but by a strong self-regulatory ecosystem. The ARPP (Autorité de régulation professionnelle de la publicité) lays out professional and ethical rules emphasizing marketing communications that are “legal, decent, honest and truthful.”
This doesn’t mean French ads can’t be persuasive or emotionally loaded; they absolutely can. But the system is built around the idea that there is such a thing as too far. That line exists, and it’s acknowledged. In America, the line feels blurrier, like it moves depending on what can be optimized.
And then there’s something else: what products are allowed to be marketed, and how.
Take alcohol advertising, for example. France’s Loi Évin (1991) is famous for imposing major restrictions on alcohol and tobacco advertising, especially around glamorizing consumption or targeting youth. One of the impacts is that alcohol advertising often emphasizes product details and origin rather than lifestyle fantasy, and certain forms of advertising (like TV and cinema) are prohibited.
That matters culturally. If you grow up in a country where certain categories can’t be sold through “life will be better when you drink this” messaging, you’re less likely to view every product as a shortcut to identity. You’re trained, in a sense, to separate objects from self-worth.
In America, marketing often blurs that separation on purpose. And perhaps this is where my strongest reaction originates. What I’m noticing isn’t just stylistic differences; it’s how each culture seems to treat the consumer’s inner world.
American marketing can feel like it’s built around vulnerability as a business model. It finds the tender parts: fear, insecurity, loneliness, and turns them into strategy. It’s loud because it’s trying to keep you from hearing yourself.
French marketing, in contrast, often feels like it assumes you have a self. It speaks to it, instead of trying to replace it.
Even when it’s selling status, it’s often selling it through taste rather than domination or refinement rather than shock. Through the suggestion that you already belong to a world where this makes sense.
There’s a difference between “This will make you better” and “This fits into the life you’re already building.”
One is an insult wrapped as an opportunity. The other is an invitation.
And I don’t want to romanticize Europe as some anti-capitalist paradise, because it isn’t. Consumerism exists here, too. Luxury is alive and well, and fast fashion is still fast fashion. Everyone is still participating in the same global system.
But the way it’s delivered changes the way it feels to live inside it.
The U.S. is also simply a heavier advertising environment by scale. Industry estimates have placed U.S. per-capita ad spend significantly higher than the global average, reinforcing the notion that Americans live under a denser “ad atmosphere.”
And when you’re surrounded by that much advertising, it stops feeling like information and starts feeling like weather. You don’t even notice it anymore, you just move through it, letting it shape you without asking permission.
That’s the part that unsettles me the most: how normalized it is.
You don’t question why every app is trying to sell you something. You don’t question why everything is “limited time.” You don’t ask why your attention is treated like a resource to mine. You just live in it until you forget there’s another way.
But Gen Z hasn’t forgotten.
If anything, they’re pushing back. You can see it in the way people scroll past anything that feels too loud, too desperate, or too salesy. There’s a collective exhaustion with being marketed at. The harder a brand demands attention or insists you buy now, the faster it gets ignored. Choice has become something people protect.
You see this especially on platforms like TikTok, where the line between content and advertising is already thin. When that line gets crossed without honesty, when an ad disguises itself as authenticity, people notice, and they don’t like it. There’s a growing frustration when creators don’t disclose sponsorships properly, because it feels like yet another attempt to take something without asking. Transparency isn’t just a legal requirement anymore; it’s an emotional one.
What does work, though, is personality, humor, and storytelling. The sense that you’re being invited into something, not cornered by it.
That’s why someone like Jack Innanen, a Canadian TikToker, stands out. When he creates an ad, it doesn’t feel like a transaction; it feels like an experience. He doesn’t demand you buy anything. He doesn’t posture or over-explain; he tells a story and makes you laugh. The product becomes secondary to the moment, almost incidental. And yet, those videos rack up thousands, sometimes millions, of views simply because people enjoy him.
The trust comes first. The brand comes later, and that’s the shift.
American consumers, Gen Z especially, are tired of being pressured. Tired of urgency as a default. Tired of feeling like every moment online is designed to extract something from them. They want their choice back. They want to feel like participants, not targets.
And maybe that’s where European marketing has something to offer, not as a perfect model, but as a reminder. That subtlety doesn’t mean weakness or that restraint can be persuasive. When you stop shouting, people might actually lean in.
Because at the end of the day, people don’t want to be sold to.
They want to choose.
The Velvet Type 
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