eLearning Sessions

1. Learning Objectives

After completing this chapter, you should be able to:

1. Explain why meaning is an important issue for marketers.
2. Describe the basic process of semiosis and the semiotic triangle.
3. Have a working knowledge of the meaning transfer model.
4. Appreciate the role of advertising and fashion in linking meanings to products.
5. Describe both ordinary and ritualized processes through which consumers transfer meaning from products to themselves.
6. Explain why spokespersons are important and describe the link between spokesperson selection and marketing success.
7. Recognize the kinds of meanings that consumers value.
8. Know why questions of meaning are important in cross-cultural contexts.
9. Recognize the significance of collecting for consumers and marketers.
10. Identify a variety of techniques though which consumers derive meaning and value from consumption.
    
    
2. Chapter Overview

• We focus on consumption processes in this chapter, specifically on the meanings that animate consumption behavior.
• Consumer motives for purchase, consumption, and possession stem in great measure from the meaning of consumption acts and objects, and the value that meaning provides.
• Some consumption activities seem to be primarily about the evocation of important meanings and values. Understanding consumers-why they buy things, why they retain some possessions and dispose of others-requires an understanding of meaning and value.
• The idea that the purchase and consumption of goods is meaningful implies the idea that goods and services are media of interpersonal communication; they are social phenomena conveying meanings that are shared by at least some others. Products can be personalized. Because people can form strong links with products and services they buy, they are important communicative devices.

  Non-Market Sources of Meaning

• There are many sources of meanings for products and services we consume. Marketing communications are only one such source, and marketed consumer products has only one source of meaningful possessions. Indeed, many of our most meaningful possessions are not marketplace commodities at all, but things without much monetary value such as heirlooms received from parents, photographs of family and friends, exchanges of dinners and parties, gardens and collections. Recognizing the emphasis consumers in advance consumer culture place on personal meanings, marketing managers are keen to determine meanings consumers value. Managers strive to provide consumers with value by linking apparently authentic meanings with their market offerings.

3. Marketing Success and the Loss of Meaning

• In consumer culture, marketers try to offer as many goods, services, images, ideas, and experiences as possible. This expansion happens by making more different things more widely exchangeable with each other. The concentration, expansion, and globalization of the consumer goods industries, the growth of affluent consumer segments in every nation, democratization, the loosening of class boundaries, and the greatly quickened flow of information through the commercial media contribute to market expansion and the quickened movement of consumer meaning.
• The success of the global market system has some unintended consequences. One is that it tends to homogenize meaning and value. If the value of every product can be reduced to money, then there is a danger that things will come to mean little more than demonstrating that consumers have the money to obtain them. This fear seems justified since consumers often seem unable to find enduring meaning in mass-marketed goods.
• Both marketers and consumers face the problem of unsatisfactory meaning. Marketers strive to create differential meanings for what are often quite similar goods. To create and sustain differentiated positiongs for products that are mostly similar, like soap powders and packaged foods, they must promote heavily. Linking products to non-market meanings is one useful way of creating differentiation. Consumers wish to define a clear social or personal identity.

4. Whose Meaning and Meaning for Whom? Semiosis

• Consumers behave based on the meanings that they ascribe to marketed products, services, and experiences. But what do we mean by meaning? When thinking about meaning and value, it's important to distinguish the value in use to the consumer, that is, the extent to which the consumer holds something dear, as distinct from a product's price, cost and other measures of marketplace value.
• To understand consumer meaning, researchers draw on the science of meaning called semiotics that we introduced in Chapter 9. Semiotics argues that communication depends upon semiosis, the process of communication by any type of sign. A sign is anything that stands for something else. A simple marketing example of a sign would be a corporate logo, brand symbol, or brand name. At a minimum, brand names and logos improve memory and product recall. Brand names and logos also symbolize quality and predictability for consumers. This is true when consumers are unfamiliar with brands as in some developing and transitional economies. Brands can serve as highly meaningful symbols for customers as when youth gang members adopt branded team sports merchandise for their exclusive use.
• Semiosis is a three-part process involving a sign, some object, and an interpretant, which is the meaning of the sign. This three-part system is called the semiotic triangle. Exhibit 18.1 illustrates the semiotic triangle and gives an example. Importantly, each semiotic triangle exists within a particular cultural context that provides consumers with the knowledge they need to interpret signs they encounter.

  Semiotic Triangle (50.0K)

• The relationship between a sign, object and dinterpretant are conventional. That is, meanings are relative to particular communications communities responding to them. Because they share significant cultural capital, members of a communications community agree (more or less) on these meanings. The clarinet as symbol of cool jazz requires a cultural knowledge of jazz that is not shared by everyone.

  Using Symbolic Conventions to Create Brand Meaning (50.0K)

• We identify three different approaches to understand consumer meanings of goods. First, we can examine the role of possessions in defining the self and creating a sense of identity. In other words, possessions embody personal values and meanings. The self is defined in part by reference to one's ancestors, and the products consumed link mourners to ancestors. Research has shown that consumers spontaneously construct life stories that involve brands. Brands can then become symbols of personal life stories. In these ways, they serve a referent or indexical role.
• The importance of consumer goods in providing a sense of self varies between areas of the world. As consumer societies become more complex and heterogeneous, more identity choices are available and this leads to more upheaval, ambiguity, and ambivalence. These tensions attach themselves to attributes like age, gender, physical beauty, social class, and race. People in consumer culture experience different and even conflicting identity choices and use consumption to reveal different aspects of themselves. Consumers in developed economies strive to create a distinctive sense of self through consumption choices and a range of meaning transfer activities that we explain including consuming, customizing, personalizing, grooming, and arranging goods.
• In developing and transitional economies, in which identities of person and place remain more sharply etched in traditional roles, some consumers are also involved with consumer goods and concerned with public display.
• The meanings of possessions involve not only personal, but public values as well. A second school of thought about consumer meaning emphasizes the use of goods within a culture's social communications system. In other words, consumer goods convey public messages about identity and status. Within particular cultural contexts and communications communities, consumers are usually able to decode the meaning of things. Consumers make inferences about social class, social status, and ethnic affiliations based on other consumers' displays of product constellations. The implication is that the meanings of consumer goods are always defined with regards to sets of recognized similarities and differences in goods. Research identifies many differences between ensembles of goods consumers within a given cultural context use to identify and differentiate groups from one another.
• A third approach looks for the particular meanings of goods and possessions that give them value. Product meaning is changeable. One aspect of this is that it changes with time. For young people anything that is "in, hip phat, fly, or holic" (to use a recent Japanese example), changes as rapidly as youth culture slang. The pace of change in meaning makes youth marketing especially difficult.
• Second, meaning is unstable across market segments. Marketers can never be certain that their images convey the meanings they wish. Consumers extract their own meanings. Idiosyncratic interpretations drawing on personal experience are common. In one study, only half of the people questioned identified the most commonly given meaning for a familiar product. Researchers have also discovered that males and females see different themes of print ads, and they even provide radically different descriptions of the advertising images themselves. The instability of meaning emphasizes the importance of carefully targeting marketing communications.
• A third problem is the meanings of things are contested by social groups and market segments. In 2000, the web portal Yahoo was taken to court in France for allowing access to Nazi collectibles auctioned on E-Bay. French law forbids broadcast of Nazi-related materials because France has determined that these materials are highly objectionable. However, some collectors may simply find them of historic interest.

5. Types of Meanings

• Consumers' market choices are determined by a variety of values or meanings. Without prior research, marketers rarely know in advance which meanings are pertinent to a specific consumption behavior. Most consumption objects, services, and experiences have multiple meanings, both public and private. The meanings derive from a variety of sources.

1. Utilitarian Meanings
• Traditionally, marketers viewed market choices and consumer preferences as driven by functional or utilitarian value. Utilitarian meaningis the perceived usefulness of a product in terms of its ability to perform functional or physical tasks. Functional value derives from functional or physical attributes. The attributes considered generally relate to performance, reliability, durability, number and type of product features, and price.
• Functional meanings are important both for product category and brand choice decisions. For instance, a consumer with no dependents will perceive little functional value in term life insurance designed to provide financial protection to survivors. This same person might see value in a long-term annuity, which contributes to financial security at retirement.
• Utilitarian or functional meanings are also associated with the things that people own. In the triad countries, utilitarian meanings are commonly ascribed to everyday shopping experiences as well. Many see shopping as a kind of work. Some consumers also view museums and art galleries primarily as a means to acquire useful skills and ideas.
2. Sacred and Secular Meanings
• Another way to approach consumer meanings is to consider the concepts of the sacred versus the secular. Consumers sometimes express certain aspects of the sacred in their consumption behaviors.
• The sacred meaning adheres in those things that are designed or discovered to be supremely important. Marketers may benefit by positioning products on sacred characteristics. Products that link consumers to one another and to nature and family or those offering emotional (always-mysterious) benefits are positioned near the sacred pole of consumer meanings.
• A variety of consumption phenomena can be experienced as sacred. Islamic commodities in Cairo, Egypt provide a striking example of sacred commodities. Among ordinary people, the consumption of prayer beads, Islamic posters, banners, cards, and stickers bearing verse from the Koran become automatic triggers for devotional acts and are responded to as physical manifestations of God's presence.
• We may think of the secular properties of things as the reverse of sacred ones. As an example of a product with a secular meaning. Consumers are more likely to interpret experiences as involving the sacred than products.
3. Hedonic Meanings
• The value of goods, services and experiences can also be based on hedonic or aesthetic values. Products acquire hedonicmeaning when associated with specific feelings or when they facilitate or perpetuate feelings. Exhibit 18.4 shows one model that suggests the hedonic meanings of consumption can be positioned in a quadrant consisting of four emotional elements.

  A Model of Hedonic Meaning (50.0K)

• Products that affect self-image such as clothing, cosmetics, plastic surgery, health foods, tattoos and other items on public display also provide hedonic value. Seemingly utilitarian items may also be associated with emotional meanings. Many consumer products arouse feelings of comfort and security through their associations with pleasant childhood experiences, remembered places, and loved one.
• Familiar brands may remind us of loved ones and comfort us. Many consumers have fond associations with remedies like "Vicks Vaporub: or foods like Nutella used in childhood. Indeed, consumers' brand equity involves the accumulated history and sentiment attached to particular brands. Loyal consumers tend to purchase such brands regularly.
• One of the most potent sources of hedonic meanings available to consumers are experiences. Travel, leisure, and tourist firms, and recreational services are all primarily in the business of delivering hedonic meanings to consumers. In these experiences, perceived freedom, fantasy fulfillment, personal growth and experimentation with identity, and escapism may all be part of the meanings derived.
• Emotional meanings of consumption are not always positive. Research on addiction, compulsive consumption, and terminal materialism (or greed) illustrates this "dark side" of consumer meanings. Compulsive consumers have extremely intense material cravings that they project onto purchase and/or consumption without experiencing any enduring satisfaction. Some consumers engage in competitive consumption due to feelings of inadequacy, others due to strong impulsive drives. Addicts represent an extreme case where addictive products (e.g., drugs, alcohol) or experiences (e.g., gambling) are used to create and maintain a stable, if distorted, sense of self.
4. Social Meanings
• Social values exert a strong influence on many product and brand decisions. There is a reflexible relationship between social relationships and the goods individuals consume. Reflexivity means that in consumer society, we intentionally communicate statements about who we are, what groups we identify with, and those from which we are different primarily through consumer goods. Others tend to see what we consume as expressions of who we are. Thus, products can be expressive of who we are and to whom we are connected socially (e.g., heirlooms and family photographs).
• Much of life is made up of social scripts, coherent sequences of events expected by individuals and involving them as participants or observers. People rely on the symbolic aspects of products to enact social scripts properly. For example, the U.S. Thanksgiving feast revolves around consumption of certain foods (turkey, stuffing, and cranberry sauce), as well as branded products considered central to particular family recipes.
• Consumer goods can be used both to express and alter social meanings, through the conspicuous consumption discussed in Chapter 6, for example.
• Some consumers organize around their interactions with brands and simultaneously create meaningful social relationships and negotiate brand meanings. They do this by using the brand to build the social group, by sharing personal experiences with the brand, emphasizing some aspects of brand meaning while rejecting others.
• Groups often dispute the social meanings of goods. The consumption of symbolically charged goods can fuel a debate. For example, brand names or products associated with gang membership or the Islamic veil associated with reactionary fundamentalism are banned in public schools and uniforms are imposed.
• Controversy about the social meanings of goods extends into fields such as law enforcement and health care where studies show that uniforms and civilian clothing impact consumers' perceptions of the quality of service delivery.
  
  
6. Movement of Meanings: Origins of Meaning

• From where does the meaning of goods and services come? Fundamentally, meaning is a product of consumer experience. Meanings usually develop from an initial state of vagueness to a state of refinement and stability. Once formed, meanings also may decay and disintegrate. They are formed in social interactions and respond to the definitions, denials, and affirmations given by others. Innovative marketers, designers, artists, and everyday consumers themselves may develop new goods and services, or new arrangements of goods and services, through which meanings can take definite form. Collective taste will be an active force in an ensuing process of selection, setting limits and guiding the development of meaning. At the same time, meanings undergo refinement and organization through attachments to products, services and experiences, and to specific social groups.
• The meaning transfer model is shown in Exhibit 18.5. The meaning transfer model suggests that consumer meanings move between three locations: 1) the culturally constituted world, 2) the good (product, service, or experience), and 3) groups of consumers. Meaning moves in a trajectory between world and good, and good and consumer or consuming unit. Cultural categories segment time, space, nature, and the human community. Class, status, gender, age, and occupation are examples of cultural categories that create a system of distinctions that organize the world. In addition to the cultural categories that comprise the scaffolding of consumer meanings, meaning is also shaped by cultural principles. Cultural principles are the concepts, values, assumptions and organizing ideas that allow phenomena to be distinguished, grouped into categories, ranked, and interrelated.

  Meaning Transfer Model (50.0K)

• Acting in conformity with the cultural blueprints comprised of cultural categories and principles, members of a community or market segment constantly play out the utilitarian, personal, sacred, secular, hedonic, and social meanings of things through their purchase and consumption decisions. In an important sense, members of consumer culture are constantly engaged in the construction of the world in which they live: defining and refining the meanings of self, community, and products and services themselves. Consumers' expression of likes and dislikes (cultural principles) not only distinguishes goods from one another, but also distinguishes consumers from one another. In this way, consumers are also divided into cultural categories.

6. Linking Cultural Meanings and Product Meanings

• Marketing communications are a vehicle for connecting meanings to consumption objects. Cultural production systems discussed in Chapter 16, like the advertising, retailing, and fashion industries, actively influence the meanings that are associated with goods.
• Marketing communications works to transfer meaning by bringing together the consumer good and a culturally particular representation of the world. To effect the transfer, the advertiser typically begins with the advertised product or service. Then, a communication plan is created that identifies particular meanings to be associated with the brand. The advertiser also identifies where the desired meanings to be associated with the brand are resident in the world in terms of categories of time, place, emotion, and person. He or she must choose from the alternatives established by the available network of cultural categories and principles recognized by the intended audience. Verbal and visual conventions are used to provide the recipient of the advertising message with the chance to decode the intended link between the representation and the consumer good portrayed.
• In the advertising model of meaning transfer, the source of a communication includes the sponsor, author, and persona. The sponsor is the firm, its name permeates the advertisement. The author is an agency or group within a firm that collectively creates the message. The personais the spokesperson depicted or implied within the advertisement itself. When a spokesperson is employed, the persona is explicit. When a spokesperson is not seen or heard, the persona is implicit, conveyed through other elements of the communication. The persona always is a fiction, crafted for the purposes of the advertisement even when the persona imitates real-life words spoken by a real life person, as when Britney Spears promotes L'Oreal products.

  Advertising Texts and Consumption Meanings

• The message is the advertising text, a symbolic statement that links signs, interpretants, and meanings together. The message presumes or instructs consumers about meaningful relationships. The model in Exhibit 18.6 identifies some available message forms.

  Advertising Model of Meaning Transfer (50.0K)

• Autobiography supposes a first person account, as in a testimonial. Narrative employs the third person (he, she, it). Dramas do away with narration allowing human or cartoon characters to act out events directly. Remember that the transfer of meaning supposes consumers understand these message forms and can interpret the meanings presented within them.
• Turning now to message content, it might be useful for you to imagine that advertising serves as a kind of culture/consumption dictionary. Its entries are products, services, and experiences, and their definitions are cultural meanings. Advertising typically does not draw on the entire range of meanings available in a culture, but on a narrower, widely understood set in order to communicate to as many members of a target market as possible. Meanings must not be too hard for consumer/readers to understand. As the technological ability to measure media preferences and customize messages increases, the constraints on symbols and meanings used in marketing communications too may loosen.
• The full details of meaning transfer in advertising are still being worked out. Referring back to the semiotic triangles addressed earlier, we distinguished sign, interpretant and object. Ads use figurative language to develop links between sign and object and interpretant. For example, ads often use similes, a figure of speech that explicitly uses a comparative term such as "like" or "as."
• Advertising copy also makes extensive use of metaphors, which are like similes with the comparative term omitted. Examples include "Fosters is Australian for Beer, ""Alitalia is Italy," and the Jaguar XJ-S "is the stuff of legends." In these cases, Australia, Italy, and legend are the meaningful signs the advertisers wish to associate with the product. Visuals are typically employed to remind or instruct readers/consumers of the meaningful associations the signs are meant to evoke.
• Symbols are the most powerful form of sign in advertising. Unlike the other two figures of speech, symbols omit any explicit expression of comparison between sign and object. Symbols are powerful mechanisms of meaning transfer because when reader/consumers expend the mental effort to interpret the meaning of the symbol they become actively involved, and in some sense, accept the associations evoked by the symbol. Of course, not all associations between sign, object, and interpretant are possible. Instead the linkages must be plausible. Exaggeration and simplification of meanings on the basis of relatively well-known cultural principles and categories help convey symbolic meaning.
• The consumers or audience for an ad can be divided into three groups. The implied consumer is the consumer presumed by the message. They are the message recipients imagined by the copywriters and other members of the author team, and whom the persona addresses. Implied consumers understand the symbolic relationships presented in the ad. Sponsorial consumers are outside of the advertising text; they are the sponsors of the advertisement. Actual consumers are real individuals who are the target market for the advertising. The transfer of meaning ultimately depends upon the willingness of actual consumers to play along with the persona's expectations of the implied audience as conveyed by the form and content of the message.

  Pictorial Conventions and Consumption Meanings

• Responses to advertising draw on a shared visual vocabulary and learned systems of pictorial conventions. The selection and combination of visual symbols to achieve persuasive effects is becoming increasingly important in marketing communications. In the U.S. there is a trend toward using less language in advertising, especially print media.
• Visuals in marketing communications are symbolic. Their significance stems from the culturally constituted world of meaning, not from any resemblance they may have to nature. Everything from the most literal portrait to the most fanciful image is equally symbolic. The visual viewpoint, focus, graphics, and layout work together in specific ways to communicate a particular meaning. Graphic elements with the pictorial field of an advertisement suggest a concept, create a fiction, or refer to other images and texts, with which marketers hope the target reader is familiar.
• To interpret these images, consumers/readers must recognize advertising visuals as examples of figurative communication rather than true representations. Processing pictures depends on selecting and knowledgeably combining learned pictorial conventions and then applying them to the picture at hand. Consumers engage in symbolic thought to interpret the visual message and decode its meaning. Advertisers generally do not need to resort to logical explanations. Of course, powerful associations in one culture may not apply in another. This causes problems in cross-national advertising.

  Characters and Consumption Meanings

• Cultural meanings are connected to the product not only through text, but also through persona who are associated with ads. Some ads contain explicit characters such as a real or fictional spokesperson. When the persona is a real or fictorial spokesperson (such as a celebrity endorser) advertising effectiveness depends on the credibility, trustworthiness, expertise, and likeability of the spokesperson as discussed in Chapter 16. The celebrity endorser (media or political figure, cartoon character) develops a meaningful persona as a result of the roles she or he has assumed in the past, and the social context, persons, and objects with which she of he has interacted in those roles. In this way the endorser draws meaning from the culturally constituted world. Then, in the endorsement process, the meanings move from the celebrity to the product through figures of speech, contiguity (closeness), similarity, and so forth.
• In one study, researchers found that the meanings attributed to previously unendorsed products - bath towels and VCRs - changed dramatically when they were linked to Madonna or to model Christie Brinkley. Interestingly, the meanings "picked up" from the two celebrities were similar across the products, although the meanings differed significantly between the two endorsers. The meaning transfer process is completed when the consumer consumes the product. The consumer has the opportunity to capture and enjoy some of the meanings associated with the endorser's persona.
• Advertising connects market segments and particular goods. Once having established these links, advertisers use these symbolic relations as given, and so do consumers.
• The principle by which a subtly modified sign evokes a familiar set of meanings was referred to in Chapter 9. This stimulus generalization or halo effect can be seen underlying the principle of product line packaging and in brand extensions of all types. For example, the distinctive red and yellow colors and design elements on Ortega® Mexican food products are those that have already been established through previous media portrayals as those associated with Mexican cuisine and culture. Of course, this symbolic association is purely conventional; there is nothing intrinsically red or yellow about Mexican culture!

7. Linking Product Meanings and Consumption Meanings

• Neither advertising nor other cultural production systems simply bestow meanings on objects or consumers. Consumers play an active role in linking product and consumption meanings. The success of many marketing campaigns depends upon actively, engaged consumers. This is true of markets in the triad nations as well as in the emerging markets of the NICs and transitional economies. In fact, we can say that consumers are actively involved in meanings. They take meanings from products. They allow themselves to be created in the image of products and services. They even create themselves both in interpreting marketing communications and through consumption of the goods and services promoted.
• Consumers provide products or their advertising images with meaning through their recognition of what they stand for, what they symbolize, at least within the space of an ad. In a series of television ads for Grey Poupon mustard, Rolls Royce automobiles are prominently featured. Again, no explicit claim is made about the luxuriousness, quality, good taste and timeliness of either the automobile or the mustard. Consumers draw on their already constituted fund of cultural knowledge to decode the meaning of the automobile and link it to the mustard. Thus, in the sense just indicated, advertisers are correct when they claim that they cannot create meaning: consumers create the meaning of the ad through their interpretations.
• Second, people take meanings from ads and products. By using particular products, with particular associated meanings and not others, consumers differentiate themselves from other people who consume different products, and presumably different meanings. Consumers may use products to create meaningful new distinctions between groups.
• Third, there is a sense in which consumers allow themselves to be created by ads and products. People sometimes buy not just to become a part of the group that the product represents, but because they already feel that they naturally belong to that group, and therefore will buy the product on offer. In some cases a consumer does not so much choose products from an array, nor in response to an advertisement, but more powerfully, by recognizing oneself as the kind of person who will use a specific product or brand. Some successful ads and acts of consumption create their own consumers. They tell you what you are like.
• It is easy to think of ads for products that hail consumers directly. This technique of direct hailing is a rhetorical device termed apostrophe. A Kirin Light Beer can label in Japan reads, "I'm off. I'll gladly work off 12 0zs. To savor a good beer." Similarly an outdoor ad for Bang & Olufssen music systems reads, "I want, a life less ordinary," and a print ad for a French discount store reads, "Wait, it's me." Using first- and second-person pronouns in ads suggests that the consumer is already a person desirous of savoring a good beer in the first case and of possessing the features of extraordinariness in the second.
• Direct hailing is consistent with the ideas of marketing communication held by many copywriters. Copywriters argue that they create effective advertisements when they develop an empathic emotional connection between some product meaning and the desires of an imagined consumer. That is, they seek to make ads so those consumers' recognize the product is hailing them very directly.
• Finally, consumers derive meaning from both ads and consumption by actually creating themselves via particular products. An ad for SAAB asks consumers to "Peel off your inhibitions. Find your own road." Here the implication is that the SAAB automobile is literally and figuratively the vehicle for this realization of a new self.

8. Modes and Rituals of Meaning Transfer

• The final step in meaning transfer involves more than just interpretation of marketing communications. It involves temporary or permanent acquisition of goods and services. Various forms of symbolic action transfer meaning from goods to consumers. Among these forms of symbolic action, we can distinguish ordinary behaviors that consumers engage in on a regular basis, and behaviors that have a ritual character.
• Playing and classifying are more social activities, while experiencing and integrating are more individual activities. The former types of meaning transfer activities help consumers to establish social identify. For instance, dressing in team colors to symbolize fandom is a form of classification through objects commonly seen among world soccer fans. The latter types (experiencing and integrating) help consumers establish individual identity. Contrasting features of different brands of major appliances provides a form of utilitarian meanings - evaluation - to a consumer, for example. Or taking a solo-hiking trip through Germany's Black Forest might provide a form of hedonic meanings - appreciation - to a consumer.
• In addition to the ordinary modes of meaning transfer, we can also identify a number of special behaviors. Among the special behaviors consumers employ to transfer meaning from objects to themselves we have distinguished possession rituals, grooming rituals, exchange rituals, and divestment rituals. The first two types are mechanisms by which people invest personal, idiosyncratic meanings in goods. The latter two, discussed in Chapters 10 and 19 respectively, involve the further movement of goods and the meanings they hold to other concerns.
• Possession rituals allow consumers to assume ownership of product meanings. Customizing, decorating, personalizing, cleaning, discussing, displaying, and photographing are some of the activities consumers engage in to assert possession and draw from the object the qualities that advertising, the fashion system, or retailing generally have invested in them. At the simplest level, consumers may remove tags, packaging, pins, labels and other marker of the retail origins of goods. To assert possession of paperbound books sold in Great Britain, or bedding, and cushions sold in North America, consumers tear off covers and tags, respectively, which prohibit commercial resale. One author found that inner city children left the tags on their clothing to display to their peers. The tag provided evidence that the item was purchased at a prestigious retail outlet and became a potent personal statement.
• Customizing is a far more elaborate procedure for asserting ownership. Customization allows for the encoding of personal meanings into products. For example, tailoring and monogramming of new clothing are devices that allow consumers to assert unique claims to ownership. Custom building of homes enables consumers to express more elaborate personal meanings.
• Evidence of repeated interaction with possessions seems to be one way in which meaning and value are asserted. Many kinds of collections are cleaned, arranged and displayed for a public view. Postage stamp collectors, for example, compete for prizes at international competitions based on the quality and creativity of the arrangements and displays they make of the stamps. Note that in these collections, canceled stamps without instrumental value are generally more valuable than used stamps.
• Various institutions, including governments, engage in possession rituals to assert ownership of public property. Examples include the crown jewels of Great Britain; the tombs of Chinese emperors; originals of the Constitution and Bill of Rights in the United States: and Belweder, the Polish presidential palace. All are possessions enshrined behind bricks, glass and security systems. Ordinary citizens' access to them is regulated. These goods have been definitively removed from the marketplace; they are priceless, perhaps even sacred. Similarly, historical preservation commissions lobby to apply the label "historical" to landmarks, buildings, and even neighborhoods. This device asserts special ownership qualities and may even protect these items from resale or redevelopment.
• Grooming rituals are repeated actions necessary to draw perishable meanings form goods. Human behavior is a form of body language communicating specific messages about an individual's social status, maturity, aspiration conformity, and even morality.
• The meaning of certain clothing, hairstyles, and make-up, ever-certain "looks" are coaxed out through the performance of a sequence of special behaviors. The aim of many grooming rituals is to enable the consumer to take on the powers of confidence, beauty, defense, glamour, etc., perceived to be resident in certain brands. Events ranging from "voguing" to Carnival are further examples of events related to extended grooming rituals.
• Often it is not the consumer but the goods that need to be groomed into order to maintain meaning. In North America culture, automobiles and homes are highly likely to be subject to such attention. In Japan, wrapping and packaging are important art forms, and most retail stores will wrap or package even the most conventional purchase with great care. Packaging conveys more meaning than the gift itself.

In Japan, Packaging May Convey More Meaning Than the Product It Contains (50.0K)

9. Malleability and Movement of Meanings

• The meaning of products and services are highly malleable. There is considerable variation in the extent to which consumers share meanings. This malleability can be examined either at the product level or at the social level. For marketers, the choice depends upon whether one is more interested in the development of product strategy or segmentation and targeting strategies. Both approaches provide insight into consumer behavior.
• It may be useful to think about product meaning as a multi-level construct. Meaningful associations attached to product concept might be arranged into four types: 1) tangible attributes; 2) cultural associations; 3) subcultural association's (those relevant to a particular group); and 4) unique personal associations. These four categories of meaning are a continuum, ranging from commonly shared judgments about the tangible qualities of products to unique, intangible personal meanings. Another way of phrasing this is that people are more likely to agree about the physical attributes of products than about their personal meanings.
• Products may be viewed as displaying varying proportions of common cultural, subcultural, and unique, personal associations depending upon varying points of view. This conception of meaning entails a number of implications. For example, the meaning of individual products may range from the highly idiosyncratic to the commonplace. The elective quality of personal meaning in advanced consumer cultures means that consumers often proclaim self-definition by appropriating the meaningful properties of consumer goods.
• Self-proclaiming is carried out in a variety of ways from the wearing of T-shirts to the adoption of sets of consumption paraphernalia that proclaims a particular identity. T-shirts are a vehicle for proclaiming personal meaning.
• Special possessions, those regarded as extensions of the self - pets, collections, memory-laden objects and symbols of core cultural values, for example - often proclaim idiosyncratic meanings.
• By contrast with idiosyncratic meanings, heavily advertised, branded consumer goods probably carry a widely shared set of meanings, even if these are taken for granted by consumers. Individuals, groups, and firms might exploit differences in widely shared product meanings. Please note, however, that all goods are invested with varying proportions of meaning types. It makes no sense to speak of goods without cultural meaning since meaning, however idiosyncratic or general, is a cultural phenomenon.
• Marketers commonly work to change meanings at each of the four levels cited above in order to align their products with the desires of target markets. Consider tangible attributes. The North American beef industry has worked hard to promote beef as a low-fat food in response to concern about the fat content of red meats. It has done so in part by re-engineering beef cattle so that they are leaner than they were 30 years ago. In this way, the beef industry has changed the tangible attributes of beef to reflect consumers' beliefs about the link between fat and health. You can explore these marketing efforts at the industry website.

  www.beef.com

• Marketers seek to exploit the unique, personal meanings that develop between people and products. Marketers also work to change subcultural associations between products and meanings. Forty years ago Honda successfully enlarged the market for motorcycles with its, "You Meet the Nicest People on a Honda" campaign, showing that motorcycles were not just for outlaws. Today, Harley Davidson works hard to differentiate the Harley market into a variety of groups for whom particular types of motorcycles are appropriate. Keeping product meanings in flux between segments is part of the current marketing strategy of Harley Davidson Company.

10. Collecting and Museums

• Collectingis the selective, active, and longitudinal acquisition, possession, and disposition of an interrelated set of differentiated objects (material things, ideas, beings, or experiences) that contribute to an derive extraordinary meaning from the set itself. Collecting provides consumers with important benefits. These include opportunities to experience hedonic and sacred meanings and to engage in possession and exchange rituals. Once items enter a collection they stop serving their utilitarian functions as , for instance, advertisements, shells on a beach, postage stamps, or dolls for ordinary play. Through collecting, objects are imbued with a personal significance. Products leave the marketplace and become singularizedthrough possession and grooming rituals (accounting, evaluating, appreciating, and assimilating). Consumer Chronicles 18.3 provides some evidence of the monetary value and importance of collecting to consumers.

Boys and Their Trading Cards (50.0K)

• Items are added to collections according to some systematic pattern, although the cultural principles that provide a blueprint for the collection and meanings that consumers derive from them may be highly personal. Aesthetic and textual meanings (i.e., character's role in comics, television shows, video games, and so forth) and market value are the guiding criterion for collecting.
• Collecting is a behavior characteristic both of individuals and institutions. Because individual collectors come in so many guises, it is difficult to generalize about the profile of serious collectors. Religious institutions have long been repositories of collections of art and other relics. The Catholic Church holds enormous stocks of art and relics. The political and economic strength of corporations and nations is judged in part by the size and diversity of their collections.

www.exhibitionsonline.org/artbrief/corpart1.htm

• What do collections mean to consumers? Among the important overlapping meanings collections appear to hold are control, magical power, evocation of other times, people, and places, legitimization for materialism, and expanded sense of self, and, of course, hedonic pleasure.
• Some collections allow collectors to enter into fantasy worlds represented by their dolls, baseball cards, stamps, etc. Many antique dealers have strong attachments to the persons, eras, and places that their collections represent.
• Collecting is a business. The modern collecting industry consists of a cultural production system that serves to transfer meaning from the culturally constituted world to collectible, as well as to distribute them among collectors. Auction houses such as Sotheby's and Christie's are widely known. Museums and retail galleries display collections of various kinds and place the stamp of connoisseurship upon them. Media vehicles for every type of collectible exist.
• Also of interest to consumer researchers and marketers are those institutions whose mission is the mass merchandising of "pre-singularized" collectibles to consumers who desire special objects.
• Museum shops and catalogs are an important part of the growing collecting industry. Although museums vary in their attitudes towards consumer marketing, purchasing souvenirs of museum attendance is an important mechanism of meaning transfer for many attendees.
• We suggested in chapters 4 and 5 that possessions and their meanings vary cross-culturally. There we mentioned a number of key differences between consumption priorities in different regions of the world. Any attempt to document differences in the dictionaries of consumer meaning cross-culturally is doomed. Either we'd end up cataloguing great long lists of differences and mountains of examples to illustrate them, or we'd be reduced to making such general characterizations of differences in key meanings that they would provide little guidance to marketers or to students of cultural differences
• Since we have emphasized the malleability and dynamism of consumption meanings in this chapter, we can mention a number of dimensions along which consumer researchers can expect to find differences in meaning between cultural areas. One obvious dimension is the underlying meaning of consumer goods.
• We can go on and contrast the meanings of goods in different cultural contexts. Contrast the meanings of personal property expressed in the Anglo-American belief that "a man's home is his castle" with the Swedish view that the countryside is public space open to everyone, even parts immediately adjacent to the country homes that dot the Swedish countryside.
• Another dimension along which consumer meaning varies cross-culturally is the identity of goods that are the focus of consumption meanings. For North Americans, their homes, including the lawn and the car are extremely meaningful consumer goods. Interesting homes and cars are important sources of meaning to women and men, respectively, on the island of Trinidad as well. The home but not the car is also critically important in Sweden, in Great Britain, in Belize, and in many other nations.
• A third dimension is the quality of meaningful possessions in circulation. Consumers in the more economically differentiated societies of the Triad nations invest meanings in many types of objects. T-shirts and bumper stickers reading "The person that dies with the most toys wins" are playful examples of the value quality in U.S. consumer culture. By contrast, consumers in less developed economies may attach meaning to a smaller number of goods. With the globalization of markets this is changing rapidly. The emergence of individual consumers who are increasingly concerned both with quantity as well as quality in consumer goods in the NICs and developing economies is likely to continue with the expansion of the global market system.
• A fourth dimension of interest cross-culturally could be the stability of consumer meanings. The development of a global market economy creates a situation in which consumers' demand for meaningful goods becomes nearly insatiable, as the money economy reduces the intrinsic differences in value between them. Global growth in marketing communications may be expected to continue for the foreseeable future, especially in the NICs and the transitional economies. With its growth may come the generalization of certain characteristics of consumer culture found in the West. Cultural categories and principles become less and less fixed. Consumption meaning moves ever more quickly. Consumption meanings become more differentiated, more compartmentalized, more transitory.
• At the same time, we expect that ad effectiveness will continue to rely on the elicitation of shared meanings from a "dictionary" common to members of particular target markets. Cross-national studies of advertising themes and executions do not reveal a tendency towards convergence on a set of global conventions, but the recycling of national and regional conventions. Thus, national and regional markets are likely to continue to differ in the symbols and meanings they find compelling. Managing meaning transfer processes will remain central to successful global marketing.
• Consumer Chronicles 18.6 illustrates each of these aspects of consumer meaning cross-culturally. The meaning of fashion in Senegal clearly varies from its meaning in Western and Eastern cultures.

  SANSE, FASHION, AND MEANING IN URBAN SENEGAL

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