Reconciling Fragmented Consumer Figures: The Metaconsumer as a Unifying Concept for Circularity

This article argues that the transition toward a circular economy requires a more integrative understanding of individuals than the traditional consumer concept allows. While marketing and consumer behavior scholarship has developed several figures, including the green consumer, creative consumer, collaborative consumer, alternative consumer, working consumer, and prosumer, these concepts remain partial and insufficiently fluid to capture the multiple roles required by circular practices. Building on these antecedents, the paper advances the metaconsumer as a unifying concept for interpreting contemporary circularity through a practice-based framework. The metaconsumer is presented as a cross-cutting figure whose agency unfolds through five constitutive role families: redistribution, mutualization, citizen movements, self-production, and independent production. Descriptive evidence from a cross-sectional pan-Canadian survey (n = 1,019) indicates that all five role families, in both their self-directed and other-directed forms, can be observed in self-reported practice, with acquisition-type practices such as second-hand reuse far more common than production-type practices. The data cannot yet capture movement between roles, which the paper identifies as the construct’s distinctive claim and as the priority for further research. The paper concludes that the metaconsumer offers a theoretically grounded and empirically plausible lens for understanding the transition from linear consumption to circularity.