Consumer Behavior (Ch. 14)

Where does culture come from?

-Influence of inner-city teens -Hip-hop/black urban culture -outsider heroes, anti-oppression messages, and alienation of blacks -"flavor" on the streets

Simon Fraser University (British Columbia)

A campus ritual in which costumed engineering students throw one another in the reflection pond during February's Polar Plunge.

MIT

A campus ritual in which each spring students haul a steer into a dorm courtyard, put it on a spit, and light a fire under it with a flaming roll of toilet paper they lower from the roof.

Wesleyan College (Connecticut)

A campus ritual in which students honor the pot-smoking Doonesbury character Zonker Harris each spring with a day of live music, face painting, and plenty of open marijuana use.

University of California at Santa Barbara

A campus ritual in which students run naked across campus on the first rainy day of the year. Princeton and the University of Michigan have banned nude springs, but at Yale Seniors still run naked through two campus libraries at the end of each semester and toss candy at underclass students as they cram for finals.

More

A custom with a strong moral overtone. It often involves a taboo, or forbidden behavior, such as incest or cannibalism. Violation of a more often meets with strong sanctions.

Classic

A fashion with an extremely long acceptance cycle.

Continuous innovation

A modification of an existing product, such as when General Mills introduces a Honey Nut version of Cheerios or Levi's promotes to shrink-to-fit jeans.

Monomyth

A myth that is common to many cultures.

Gone with the Wind

A mythic blockbuster where myths often take place in times of upheaval such as wars.

Custom

A norm that controls basic behaviors, such as division of labor in a household or how we practice particular ceremonies.

Ritual

A set of multiple, symbolic behaviors that occurs in a fixed sequence and is repeated periodically.

Dynamically continuous innovation

A significant change to an existing product.

Myth

A story with symbolic elements that represents a culture's ideals. Often focuses on some kind of conflict between two opposing forces, and its outcome serves as a moral guide for listeners.

Fad

A very short-lived fashion.

Meme

An idea or product that enters the consciousness of people over time- examples include tunes, catch phrases.

Craft product

An object we admire because of the beauty with which it performs some function (A ceramic ashtray or hand-carved fishing lures.)

Art product

An object we admire strictly for its beauty or because it inspires and emotional reaction in us (perhaps bliss, or perhaps disgust.)

Innovation

Any product or service that consumers perceive to be new.

Sacred events

Athletic events, religious ceremonies

Trialability

Because we think an unknown product is risky, we're more likely to adopt an innovation if we can experiment with it prior to making a commitment.

Superstitions

Beliefs that run counter to rational thought or are inconsistent with known laws of nature.

Fortress brands

Brands that we use to perform our rituals.

Prerequisites for Successful Adoption

Compatibility, Trialability, Complexity, Observability, Relative advantage

Discontinuous innovation

Creates really big changes in the way we live.

Three major subsystems of Culture Production System (CPS)

Creative, Managerial, Communications

Types of crescive norms

Custom, more, conventions.

Profane consumption

Describes objects and events that are ordinary or everyday; they don't share the specialness of the sacred ones.

Separation

Detaches from his original group or status

Star Trek

Document the adventures of the starship Enterprise

Cultural system involves:

Ecology, Social Structure, and Ideology

Meme theory

Explains why a style diffuses through the population so quickly with a medical metaphor.

Cultural gatekeepers

Filter the overflow of information as it travels down the "funnel."

Creative subsystem

Generates new symbols and products

Gift-giving ritual proceeds in three distinct stages

Gestation, presentation, reformulation

Gestation

Give procures an item to mark some event. This event may be structural (prescribed by the culture like Christmas presents) or it could be emergent (decision is more personal)

Fashion system

Includes all the people and organizations that create symbolic meanings and transfer those meanings to cultural goods. -Fashion is code -Fashion is context-dependant -Fashion is undercoded

Observability

Innovations that are readily apparent are more likely to spread because we can learn about them more easily.

Ritual artifacts

Items we need to perform rituals such as wedding rice, birthday candles, diplomas, specialized foods and beverages, trophies and plaques, band uniforms, greeting cards, and retirement watches.

Sacred Souvenir Icons

Local products (wine from California), Pictorial images (postcards), Piece of the rock (seashells), Literal representations (a miniature version of the Statue of Liberty), Markers (Hard Rock Cafe T-Shirts)

Cultural formula

Many popular art forms, such as detective stories or science fiction, follow a cultural formula, where familiar roles and and props occur consistently.

Cultural selection

Many possiblities initially compete for adoption; most of them drop out of the mix as they make their way down the path from conception to consumption.

Condoms

Marketed in pastel carrying cases for female buyers signaled changes in attitudes toward sexual responsibility and openness.

Hoarding

Merely unsystematic collecting

Myths serve four interrelated functions in a culture:

Metaphysical, Cosmological, Sociological, and Psychological

Relative advantage

Most importantly, the product should offer relative advantage over other alternatives. The consumer must believe that it will provide a benefit other products cannot offer.

Crescive norms

Much more subtle norms that we discover when we interact with others.

A few characteristics of a fad

Nonutilitarian- does not perform any meaningful function. Fad often spreads impulsively- people do not undergo stages of rational decision making before they join in. Fad diffuses rapidly, gains quick acceptance, and dies.

Conventions

Norms that regulate how we conduct our everyday lives. These rules often deal with the subtleties of consumer behavior, including the "correct" way to furnish one's house, wear one's clothes, or host a dinner party.

Contamination

Objects we associate with sacred events or people become sacred in their own right. (Items that belonged to or were even touched by a famous person).

Reality engineering

Occurs when marketers appropriate elements of popular culture and use them as promotional vehicles.

Sacralization

Occurs when ordinary objects, events, and even people take on sacred meaning.

Sacred consumption

Occurs when we "set apart" objects and events from normal activities and treat them with respect or awe.

Objectification

Occurs when we attribute sacred qualities to mundane items (such as smelly socks.)

Holiday rituals

On holidays, we step back from our everyday lives and perform ritualistic behaviors unique to those occasions

Cooptation

Outsiders transform their orignal meanings.

Presentation

Process of gift exchange. Recipient responds to the gift either appropriately or not and the donor evaluates this response.

Behavioral Science Perspectives and Models of Fashion

Psychological, Economic, Sociological, Medical.

Diffusion of innovations

Refers to the process whereby a new product, service, or idea spreads through a population.

Collecting

Refers to the systematic acquisition of a particular object or set of objects.

Cosmetics made from natural materials without animal testing

Reflected consumers' apprehensions about pollution, waste, and animal rights

Sacred places

Religious/mystical and country heritage such as Stonehenge, Mecca, Ground Zero in New York City.

TV dinners

Represented changes in family structure and the onset of a new informality in American home life.

E.T: The Extraterrestrial

Represents a familiar myth involving messianic visitation.

Binary opposition

Represents two opposing ends of some dimension

Aggregation

Returns to society with his new society.

Rites of passage

Rituals we perform to mark a change in social status.

Enacted norms

Rules we explicitly decide on such as that a green traffic light means "go" and a red one means "stop"

Rites of passage stages

Separation, Liminality, aggregation

Late adopters

Somewhere in the middle of laggards and innovators and early adopters. These people are the mainstream public. They are interested in new things, but they do not want them to be too new.

Trickle-down theory

States that two conflicting forces drive fashion change.

Plinking

The act of embedding a product or service link in a video.

Economic exchange

The giver transfers an item of value to a recipient, who in turn must reciprocate.

Compatibility

The innovation should be compatible with consumers' lifestyles.

Product placement

The insertion of real products in fictional movies, TV shows, books, and plays.

Ideology

The mental characteristics of a people and the way they relate to their environment and social groups.

Liminality

The middle stage where he is in limbo between statuses.

Fashion

The process of social diffusion by which some groups of consumers adopts a new style. A fashion (or style) is a particular combination of attributes. To be in fashion means that some reference group positively evaluates this combination.

Complexity

The product should be low in complexity. We will choose a product that's easier to understand and use rather than a more complex one.

Throughput sector

The set of agents that filter the overflow of information as it travels down the funnel. These people play a role in decision making. (Example: move, restaurant, car reviewers, interior designers, disc jockeys, retail buyers, magazine editors)

Culture productive system

The set of individuals and organizations that create and market a cultural product.

Ecology

The way a system adapts to its habitat.

Social Structure

The way people maintain an orderly social life.

Grooming rituals

These ceremonies help us transition from our private self to our public self, or back again.

Cosmological

They emphasize that all components of the universe are part of a single picture.

Metaphysical

They help to explain the origins of existence

Sociological

They maintain social order because they authorize a social code for members of a culture to follow

Psychological

They provide models for personal conduct.

Communications subsystem

To give meaning to the new product and provide it with a symbolic set of attributes.

Managerial subsystem

To select, make tangible, produce, and manage the distribution of new symbols and products.

Mediating figure

Typically resolves the conflict between mythical and opposing forces; this links the opposites as it shares characteristics of each.

Laggards

Very slow to adopt new products

Acceptance cycles

We identify different classes of fashion when we look at the relative length of their ______.

Gift-giving ritual

We procure the perfect object, meticulously remove the price tag, carefully wrap the object, and deliver it to the recipient.

Ritual script

We use this to identify the artifacts we need, the sequence we should use them, and who uses them. (Examples: graduation programs, fraternity manuals, and etiquette books.)

Desacralization

When a sacred item/symbol is removed from its special place or is duplicated in mass quantities (becomes profane).

Advergaming

Where online games merge with interactive advertisements that let companies target specific types of consumers.

Reciprocity

You believe if someone gives you a gift you have to give them something of equal value.

Culture

a society's personality. Includes both abstract ideas, such as values and ethics, and material objects and services such as automobiles, clothing, food, art, and sports a society produces.

Sacred people

celebrities, royalty

One sixth of population are

innovators and early adopters and one sixth are laggards.

Marketers are eager to identify

innovators because they are always on the lookout for novel products or services and who are first to try something new. Innovators tend to be category specific.

Two thirds of the population are

late adopters

Norms

rules that dictate what is right or wrong, unacceptable or acceptable.

Early adopters

share many of the same characteristics as innovators. An important difference is their high degree of concern for social acceptance, especially with regard to expressive products such as clothing and cosmetics.

Reformulation stage

the giver and receiver redefine the bond between them either looser or tighter to reflect their new relationship after exchange.

Values

very general ideas about good and bad goals.