eLearning Session

After completing this chapter, you should be able to:

1. Understand the meaning and nature of culture.
2. Discuss the ideas of cultural blueprints, categories, and principles.
3. Explain way the fact that culture is learned in significant to marketers.
4. Describe the importance of cultural values to consumer behavior and be able to describe some ways of measuring cultural values.
5. Give some examples of cultural myths and symbols and marketing's role in reproducing them.
6. Explain and identify some examples of consumer rituals.
7. Explain cultural creolization and the role of marketing in this process.

• This chapter will provide you with an introduction to the nature of culture. We pay particular attention to consumer culture.
• In this chapter, in order to help you understand and manage the interaction of cultural and consumer behavior, we discuss the meaning culture, and its expression in cultural values, cultural myths and symbols and cultural rituals.
• We also introduce you to some ideas about the evolving relationship between marketing and culture.

• Social sciences such as sociology, anthropology, and psychology offer varying definitions of culture. Marketers also hold varying conceptions of culture. Marketers also hold varying conceptions of culture. A traditional marketing view is shown on the left in Exhibit 5.1.

Exhibit 5.1: Two Views of Culture and Consumer Behavior (50.0K)

• In this view, culture consists primarily of values and norms. Values are enduring beliefs about desirable outcomes that transcend specific situationsand shape one's behavior.Norms are informal, usually unspoken rules thatgovern behavior.
• Values and norms help to determine perceptual and cognitive principles that, in turn, influence people's attitudes toward marketing offerings and consumption practice.
• In this perspective, the key questions for marketers are to what extent should they adapt market offerings to other cultural contexts, and how should they do it.
• The authors define a society's culture as whatever one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members. What one has to know varies between cultures, but always includes language, norms, values, and objects, as well as the myths, symbols, and rituals that we discuss later in the chapter. In this view, values, norms, and other cultural elements differ in kind, not merely in strength, between different cultures.
• To complicate matters, culture cannot be reduced to a list of language, things, people, behaviors, or values, although all of these are important in a culture.
• Thus, culture consists of shared blueprints or schemas both for action and for understanding.
• Blueprints for action and interpretation are conducted by culture from two basic elements. First is through cultural categories. Cultural categories organize time, space, nature, and the human community. For example, class, occupation, ethnicity, gender, and age are examples of cultural categories. These categories help organize a system of social distinctions that arranges the world of consumption. The globalization of markets has increased the pace of change in the nature and meaning of cultural categories. Second is through cultural principles. Cultural principles are the values, norms, and beliefs that allow things to be grouped into cultural categories, ranked, and interrelated.Cultural principles enable us to classify products into categories and identify new brands as members of a particular category. Cultural principles structure the perception of time and many other things.
• Language has a significant influence on our blueprints for action and interpretation. People's view of the world depends very much on the character and structure of the language they speak. Language is not only an instrument for describing events, it also shapes events. Observers using different languages will present different facts in the "same" situations or they will arrange similar facts in different ways.
• Language is much more important than many international marketers realize.
• One of the best ways that cultural categories are established is through material objects. Objects (especially consumer goods) contribute to the construction of the culturally constituted world because they are a visible record of blueprints for action and interpretation.
• Consumer goods give cultural meanings concrete forms.
• People's ways of acquiring, using, and disposing of goods and services enable them to act out cultural blueprints.
• When consumer goods show a distinction between two cultural categories, they express the cultural principles that distinguish the categories.
• Clothing, like other publicly consumed products, is valuable in separating cultural categories of time, space, gender, ethnicity, and class. Clothes represent cultural principles-we agree on some of their meanings.
• Acting in conformity with cultural "blueprints," members of a community or market segment constantly illustrate the distinctions between cultural categories through their purchase choices and consumption decisions.
• Consumers' expression of likes and dislikes (cultural principles) distinguishes both goods and consumers from one another.
• In our view of culture, a key question for marketers becomes how to align their products with cultural blueprints, categories, and principles. To successfully communicate how to use products, who should use them, and what benefits their use provides, marketing communications should build on cultural blueprints.
• The diversity that may exist in a particular culture is fostered by many factors including ethnic and class differences, individuals' lifestyles, family and household traditions, and personal experience.
• Cultural variability often leads to the development of differences in consumer lifestyles within and across national borders.

• Consumer researchers interested in culture have devoted most of their attention to understanding value.
• Values include instrumental values, which are shared beliefs about how people shouldbehave, and terminal values, which are desirable life goals. Examples of instrumental values include competence, compassion, sociality, and integrity. Ambition is an instrumental value that might help one attain a comfortable life, which is a terminal value. Terminal values include social harmony, personal gratification, self-actualization, security, love and affection, and personal contentedness.
• Cultural values are shared broadly across a society. They are learned, reinforced and modified within subcultures, ethnic groups, social classes, and families.
• Some believe that behaviors develop from attitudes, which in turn derive from more general or abstract cultural values. This is referred to as the Value-Attitude-Behavior Hierarchy. According to this model, within any given consumption choice situation, abstract values affect midrange attitudes that lead to specific consumer behaviors. For example, the abstract values of security and self-confidence may be linked to attitudes about preventing cavities and providing clean white teeth, respectively.
• Among the frequently used value measures are the Rokeach Value Survey(RVS), the List of Values (LOVS) and Hofstede's worker values. Researchers have found considerable cross-cultural differences in levels of these general sets of values.
• The Rokeach Value Survey (RVS) identifies a set of 18 terminalvaluesor desired end states and instrumentalvalues or actions.
• The Rokeach Value Survey (RVS) has not been widely applied to consumer behavior issues.
• One problem with the Rokeach Value Survey, like other measures of cultural values, is that the values are not closely related to consumer's daily lives. For example, "world peace" ranks as very important, but the link between this value and consumer behavior is not easy to establish.
• As a response to criticisms of RVS, researchers at the University of Michigan Survey Research Center developed an alternative Lists of Values (LOVS) measure. The List of Values includes nine values: sense of belonging, fun and enjoyment, warm relationships with others, self fulfillment, being well respected, a sense of accomplishment, security, and self respect. In the US, LOV has been related to a number of important measures of mental health, well being, and adaptation to society.
• LOV has been related to some U.S. consumer behaviors including shopping, spending, nutrition attitudes, natural food choice, fashion items and gift giving.
• Measures linking LOVS and particular patterns of consumer preferences are often weak or inconsistent across cultures and contexts. This problem of translation limits the usefulness of LOVS and lends support to the view that cultural blueprints differ between cultures.
• Another general value dimension of considerable interest to marketers is the individualism versus collectivism dimension. Holstede's study of "worker values" at IBM revealed that the United States and the English-speaking countries have high levels of individualism (competition is high, independence and separateness are valued, and people believe individual status and position are earned and changeable).
• Confusing and inconclusive results are unfortunately typical of studies that have sought to link consumer behaviors and Hofstede's abstract cultural values. Part of the problem is that values do not translate well.
• Researchers have identified less universal values that RVS, LOVS, and Hofstede's. Understanding core cultural values may be useful even if cross-cultural comparisons of values are not always useful. The reason is that people's purchases are indirectly connected to fulfilling core values. Core values are like goals that can motivate action. Therefore, understanding these values may be useful for product positioning purposes, including marketing communications.
• Exhibit 5.2 compares a constellation of U.S. values with one of Japanese values. As illustrated in the exhibit, these core values are closely connected with each other. For example, for many U.S. citizens the quantity and quality of their material possessions measures achievement and success.

Exhibit 5.2: Core Japanese and American Values (50.0K)

• A terminal value for many U.S. citizens is that all people should have equal opportunities for achievement; through effort, entrepreneurship and courage (instrumental values), they believe anyone can succeed. Not surprisingly, then, one common motive for purchasing in the U.S. is rewarding for personal achievement.
• Another value concept that interests marketers is consumer ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism may be thought of as an instrumental value that helps provide a template for action. It is a belief that one's own system of tastes and preferences is better than that of another cultural group. This value is related to purchase preferences for goods produced in one's own country.
• Good Practice 5.1 provides a scale to measure consumer ethnocentrism. Each of the 17 items is scored on a 7-point scale, with 1 meaning strongly disagree and 7, strongly agree. Highly ethnocentric consumers have high average scores.

Good Practice 5.1: The Cetscale: How Ethnocentric are You? (50.0K)

• In fact, cultural values are subject to influence by marketing practices. For example, by manipulating the level of ease of recall of value-based associations embedded in marketing communications, some research provides evidence that cultural preferences may be relatively pliable.
• A value of interest to marketers is materialism. Materialism is a terminal value defined as the importance a consumer attaches to worldly possessions, or as a consumption-based orientation to happiness seeking. Measurements of consumer materialism find that materialism is a combination of other value orientations including non-generosity, possessiveness, envy, and preservation (a tendency to hang on to things).
• Materialism has generally been seen as a Western trait that achieved an elevated place with the development of industrial and post-industrial life. Most researchers see the spread of materialism and consumer culture as going hand-in-hand.
• Critics argue that values such as RVS, LOVS, or Hofstede's survey are too abstract to provide much help in understanding particular consumption patterns.
• More work is needed to understand how cultural values relate to consumer behavior and how they vary cross-culturally. Better understanding of the relationships between culture, value preferences, consumers' evaluation of product/service offerings, and purchase and consumption behavior would be useful for more effective cross-national marketing. Without understanding basic values, it is unlikely that marketers can influence specific behaviors within a culture.
• Marketers need to understand how values interact to produce consumption preferences.

• In addition to values, societies also possess sets of myths and symbols. Myths and symbols are an example of what we have called a template or cultural blueprint for interpretation because they help us understand what we observe in social life. A mythis a story containing symbolic elements that expressshared emotions and cultural values.
• Myths serve several important functions in culture. First, myths emphasize how things are interconnected.
• Brand appeals also stress how things are interconnected in mythical ways, for example, a La-Z-Boy furniture ad that links its furniture to "snapshots" of a mythical family's life.
• Myths also maintain social order by authorizing a social code. Urbanlegends are stories passed by word of mouth that purport to be nearly first hand accounts of real events, but are fictitious. They contain a moral lesson.
• Myths provide psychological models for individual behavior and identity.
• Understanding myths is important for creating successful media products, and they play a role in building the image of a company and products.
• Important behaviors in any society are better understood by reference to shared cultural symbols. Cultural symbols are objects that represent beliefs and values. Culture is well reflected in core symbols, symbols that are emotionally powerful and that contain multiple meanings. In the U.S. core symbols include George Washington and the Wild West.
• People use core symbols in different ways. The US flag is a public symbol, typically used to mark official places and events.
• Cultural symbols can be enlisted to help position products and services. Not only can products and services be positioned using key cultural symbols, but consumer goods can also become cultural symbols.
• Consumer goods may also become regional symbols. In Glasgow, Scotland, Irn Bru has been the subject of songs, stories, jokes, films, and more. It became famous because of its ads that poked fun of those of Pepsi and Coke, positioning it as an alternative to these U. S. brands. There is even a Church of Irn Bru websit.

www.members.tripod.co.uk/~BARRS_IRN_BRU/

• Some categories of consumer goods are apt to convey important symbolic meanings, and certain symbolic meanings are apt to be conveyed by consumer goods.
• Food is a flexible symbol of identity, capable of symbolizing fine distinctions. What you eat may tell us you are young/old/male/female/high status/low status/sick/well.
• Consumers use goods in many transitional or developing societies to symbolize "modernity" or their ability to participate in global consumer society. Consumers' conspicuous consumption of status symbols is a frequent by-product of economic development. Conspicuous consumption is the acquisition and visible display of "luxury" goods and services to demonstrate one's ability to afford them.

• Cultural rituals are a good example of activities that combine blueprints for action and blueprints for understanding. Cultural Rituals consist of behaviors that occur in a relatively fixed sequence, and that tend to be repeated periodically.
• Rituals organize people's feelings and facilitate and simplify group communications. That is, rituals organize our experience and give it meaning. They are particularly useful in handling situations involving risk (whether risk is social, emotional, or physical).
• Consumer rituals propose cultural principles and blueprints for consumer behavior that provide marketers with many opportunities for product positioning.
• Rituals can be stimulated by a culture's cosmological belief system, by cultural values, or as a source of group learning. One possible typology of ritual experience is provided in Exhibit 5.3.

Exhibit 5.3: Kinds of Rituals (50.0K)

• People undertake possession rituals when products move from the marketplace to the home or workplace where they are consumed. Possession rituals also occur when people move into a new home or take possession of pre-owned goods and may involve cleansing, customization, or making offerings such as the Jewish custom of tacking a mezuzah to the door frame.
• Grooming rituals tend to be private behaviors that aid in the transition from private to public self and back again. Clean/dirty, public/private, work/leisure are three of the symbolic transformations that are often involved in grooming rituals. Numerous beauty products (shampoos, cosmetics, perfumes) and personal services (salons, spas, health clubs, fat farms, resorts, etc.) are marketed based on their contribution to making grooming rituals successful.
• Divestment rituals occur when consumers relinquish possession of objects.
• Exchange rituals, like holiday gift giving, are an extremely important ritual type that we discuss in chapter 12. Another important class of exchange rituals is called rites of passage. In rites of passage like college graduation, participants mark events that symbolize changes in individuals' social status. Rites of passage symbolize the permanence of a change in social status and the behaviors associated with that change. Ritual goods are indispensable to the meaning of the ritual experience and are used to communicate symbolic messages.
• Rituals have life cycles; they decline and gain in popularity, and new cultural rituals emerge as other ones fade. One by-product of the globalization of marketing is the emergence of global consumption rituals. Christmas and the World Cup soccer championship provide examples of the few ritualized celebrations that are widely celebrated around the world.

• One thing to notice about culture is that although culture is shared we hardly ever notice our own culture. This is because culture is an all-encompassing phenomenon like gravity.
• Failure to appreciate cultural differences because of their all-encompassing quality causes global marketing blunders.
• Different norms governing the use of time, interpersonal interaction, personal space, and body language (among other things) are primary reasons why consumers from one culture often misunderstand service experiences in other cultures.
• Even though we don't notice our own culture very often, and we generally don't remember learning about it, culture is learned. If we learn a culture by growing up in it, as natives, we refer to our learning as enculturation.
• Marketing communications and marketing mixes can provide sources of enculturation.
• A major source of multinational marketing blunders is a lack of appreciation for the learned nature of culture, and the tenacity of learned preferences. Vast numbers of food products have required taste modifications to appeal to local consumers. For example, Nestle makes dozens of versions of its popular instant coffee to appeal to local consumers. Failure to adapt is costly.
• Marketing is playing an increasingly active role in the enculturation process.
• Marketers market to women by symbolically associating products with lifestyles and images that reflect, reinforce and propagate these cultural meanings. For example, PPP Health Care's 1997 "Women's Plan" and The Prudential's recent "Wanna Be" campaign are built on the cultural assumption that women of the 1990s are independent. The value of independence draws on liberal feminist thinking in British and North American culture that promotes women's freedom from male domination.

www.ppphealthcare.co.uk

• Learning a new or foreign culture through direct or indirect experience of others is known as acculturation. Immigrants use changes in consumption to learn new cultural templates for action and interpretation.
• When foreign corporations or media promote foreign templates for action and interpretation, they are encouraging acculturation. For example, MTV, which has affiliates in Brazil, India, and China as well as Europe and North America, has helped to create a global youth culture.
• Cultural boundaries are formalized through social institutions that levy sanctions (or punishments) and provide rewards to encourage us to conform to expected cultural behaviors.
• Another point is that culture is patterned.Cultural blueprints for action and interpretation are patterned in at least three slightly different ways. First, theyare repeated and reinforced throughout the society, contributing to a pattern of culture. Thus, the American value of rugged individualism is repeated in the mythical lives of action heroes like James Bond, industry tycoons like Bill Gates, and even cartoon characters like the Energizer Bunny! Second, blueprints for action and interpretation are reaffirmed and renewed through ritual consumption experiences. Third, cultural blueprints tell us what things connect with what other things. Children learn early what consumption objects go with different occupational roles in their culture; the stethoscope goes with the nurse and doctor, the hardhat goes with the construction worker, and the microphone goes with the pop star, for instance.

Individualistic Heroes: Bill Gates, James Bond, and the Energizer Bunny (50.0K)

• Members of a culture also learn the aesthetics typical of their culture, what consumer goods it is "tasteful" to pair together. Preferred colors, smells, tastes and sounds differ between cultures. Consumer Chronicles 5.3 provides an illustration of the learning, patterning, and the taken-for-granted, all encompassing qualities of consumer culture.

Consumer Chronicles 5.3: Culture in Your Toast (50.0K)

• Patterns of consumption aesthetics impose normative pressure on consumers. This is called the Diderot Effect. The Diderot effect is the "force that encourages an individual to maintain a cultural consistency in his/her complement of consumer goods. Many of us have experienced the Diderot effect. For example, we may buy a piece of clothing on sale, and then reflect that we "don't have anything to go with it." We may search for shoes and other accessories to go with the piece of clothing. By the time we're through shopping, we have a complement of consumer goods that "go together," but perhaps we have spent more than we expected! The Diderot effect also comes into play in lifestyle marketing and sports merchandising.
• Culture is adaptive and dynamic.A society's culture does evolve in a given environment combining people, materials and objects, resources, and ideas and beliefs. But cultures are open systems. This means that they influence and are influenced by changes in their environment. Culture changes, although it usually doesn't change quickly.
• For example, American culture has been described as materialistic since the early 1800s. Consumer Chronicles 5.4 suggests that American culture may become less materialistic and the cultures of developing nations more materialistic as they are exposed to more marketing communications and consumer goods.

Consumer Chronicles 5.4: Comparing Turks and Americans on Materialism (50.0K)

• The global spread of branded consumer goods like Nike, Bennetton and Gap, retail formats like Wal-Mart or Carrefour, fast food frachises from McDonald's to Jolibee, consumer holidays like Christmas, popular culture forms like hip-hop, reggae, and world music, and institutions such as beauty pageants are changing cultures the world over.
• New global cultural forms provide consumers with common templates for action and interpretation through which to express national and local cultural diversity. Thus, in the era of consumer culture, cultures are no longer separate from one another and relatively unchanging. Instead, they are overlapping dynamic systems that conform to social boundaries that are heavily influenced by the spread of consumer goods and global marketing communications.

The Manchester United Football Club Website Offers Fans the Opportunity to Purchase a Wide Variety of Merchandise (50.0K)

• The concentration, expansion, and internationalization of the consumer goods industries, the growth of affluent consumer segments in every nation, democratization, loosening of class boundaries, and a quickened flow of information through the commercial media all contribute to global market expansion. These developments have led to the development of consumer culture. Consumer culture refers to an organized social and economic arrangement in which markets govern the relationship between meaningful ways of life and the symbolic resources on which they depend.
• Consumer culture may be defined first by global expansion of the market to virtually every good, service, image, idea, and experience. A second defining characteristic is the increasing importance of materialism among new consumers. A third element is parallel changes in personal identify. A fourth element that makes possible the spread of consumer culture is the rapid movement of economic migrants, religious pilgrims, and guest workers between even remote villages in the developing world and cosmopolitan centers in the Triad nations. A final defining characteristic of consumer culture is the exceptional influence of the fashion industry and the rapid pace of turn over in fashions of every kind. In fact, an important source of consumer culture is the fashion industry, an industry that now includes movies, music, food, advertising, and interior design as well as clothing.
• One significant trend in consumer culture is the global spread of brands and consumption practices. Pepsi has the goal of developing one global image that is powerful for everybody. However, while there are global brands, they are really not global people.
• A second important trend in global consumer culture is the creolization of consumption patterns. This refers to consumption patterns that combine elements of local and foreign consumption traditions. Creolization concerns consumers in all nations.
• Creolization is also evident in some areas of consumer behavior in Europe and North America. Examples include the blended musical forms common in world music and creolized cuisine.
• Why do people engage in creolized consumption? One reason is that creolized consumption allows consumers to experience other cultural values and beliefs without necessarily sacrificing their own.
• Some consumers react in an ethnocentric manner against the globalization of consumption patterns and values, rejecting foreign consumption patterns and values. This represents a third trend in global consumer culture toward a nostalgic defense of so-called "traditional" consumption value. This can lead to boycotts of foreign consumer products.
• Finally, a trend may be detected, especially in the Triad nations, toward the consumption of presumably authentic cultural products from transitional and third world cultures.