Discussion Opportunity—Ask: How do you think Halloween should be celebrated (if at all)?
What does this say about your culture and your view toward contemporary culture and values?
1. Rites of passage are rituals that mark a change in social status.
a. Every society sets aside times when these passages occur. Marketers attempt to
reach consumers during these passage times.
b. There are three stages in a rite of passage.
i. Separation—detaching from the original group.
ii. Liminality—person is literally in between statuses.
iii. Aggregation—person reenters society after rite of passage.
Discussion Opportunity—Ask: How did your family react when you went off to college for your
freshman year? When did you first go back home? When did you get back together with your
high school friends? What happened when you came back to college this year? If you did not
leave home to go to college, how was this process different?
c. The final rite of passage is death. This ritual is tightly scripted in most societies.
Discussion Opportunity—Ask students to think about marketing death. Not very pleasant, is it? It
is, however, a huge industry. List the rituals associated with death. How can these be marketed
tastefully (to those who do not want to think about the subject)?
IV. Sacred and Profane Consumption
Sacred consumption involves objects and events that are “set apart” from normal activities
and are treated with some degree of respect or awe. Profane consumption involves
consumer objects and events that are ordinary, everyday objects and events that do not share
the “specialness” of sacred ones.
A. Sacralization
Sacralization occurs when ordinary objects, events, and even people take on sacred
meaning.
1. Objectification occurs when we attribute sacred qualities to mundane items.
2. One way objectification occurs is through contamination, where objects we associate
with sacred events or people become sacred in their own right.
3. Collecting refers to the systematic acquisition of a particular object or set of objects.
This is different from hoarding, which is merely unsystematic collecting. Collecting
typically involves both rational and emotional components.
Discussion Opportunity—Ask: How do you attempt to make your home special, homey, and even
sacred? How can marketers use this desire to market to you?
Discussion Opportunity—Describe a special sacred place that you have been to.
B. Domains of Sacred Consumption
1. A society “sets apart” sacred places because they have religious or mystical
significance. Some profane places are endowed with sacred qualities.
2. We can idolize sacred people as we set them apart from the masses.
3. Public events can resemble sacred, religious ceremonies (e.g. sporting events, where
athletes are central figures in a hero tale; tourism, which is often marked by
souvenirs).
Discussion Opportunity—Have students tell about an event that has become sacred to them. Ask:
Have you ever seen this event used in a marketing effort? What will you tell your children about
this event? Will it become part of their memory as well?
Discussion Opportunity—What personal mementos have students collected that might be
construed as being tied to a sacred place, person, or event? Bring it to class.
C. From Sacred to Profane and Back Again
1. Some consumer activities move back and forth between the sacred and profane
spheres over time.
2. Desacralization occurs when a sacred item or symbol is removed from its special
place or is duplicated in mass quantities, becoming profane as a result. Religion to
some extent has become desacralized.
Discussion Opportunity—Give an example of a person, event, or object that you have sacralized.
Give an example of a person, event, or object that you have desacralized. Explain why this
occurred. Has it had any impact on your purchasing patterns?
V. The Diffusion of Innovations
A. The Diffusion Process
1. Diffusion of innovation refers to the process whereby a new product, service, or idea
spreads through a population.
2. An innovation is any product or service that is perceived to be new by consumers
(even if it has been used by others in other places).
Discussion Opportunity—Ask: What product have you recently purchased that you would
classify as an innovation? Where did you hear about it? What thought process did you go
through before you made the purchase?
B. How Do We Decide to Adopt an Innovation?
1. Figure 14.3 shows the types of adopters of innovations.
2. Innovators and early adopters are very quick to adopt new products. Laggards are
the slowest. Late adopters are in the middle.
3. Innovators are important to marketers because they are looking for and willing to try
something new. They are socially active risk takers with high education and income.
4. Early adopters share characteristics with innovators, but have a high degree of
concern for social acceptance and often wait for innovators to field test a style
change.
*****Use Figure 14.3 Here *****
Discussion Opportunity—Create an illustration of the types of adopters using a high-tech
product or the e-commerce on the Internet.
C. Behavioral Demands of Innovations
1. Innovations can be categorized in terms of the degree to which they demand changes
in behavior from adopters.
2. Three major forms are:
a. A continuous innovation refers to a modification of an existing product.
b. A dynamically continuous innovation is a more pronounced change in the
existing product.
c. A discontinuous innovation creates major changes in the way we live.
Discussion Opportunity—With input from students, make a list of products that fit the three
forms of innovations. Discuss the significance of these innovations. How does the promotion for
these products differ?
D. Prerequisites for Successful Adoption
1. Regardless of how much behavioral change is demanded by an innovation, several
factors are desirable for a new product to succeed.
2. These attributes include:
a. Compatibility—must fit the consumer’s lifestyle.
b. Trialability—reduce risk by letting the consumer try it.
c. Complexity—the lower the better.
d. Observability—innovations that are observable spread faster.
e. Relative advantage—must give advantages other products do not.
3. Note that complexity has a reverse relationship from the other characteristics. The
simpler the innovation, the faster the rate of adoption.
Discussion Opportunity—Ask: What do you think were the three most important innovations in
your lifetime (so far)? In your parents’ lifetime? In your grandparents’ lifetime? How did the
innovations you just listed match with the prerequisites for successful adoption list?
Discussion Opportunity—Using an example of your own choosing, illustrate how the
prerequisites for successful adoption influenced your purchase of a product or service.
VI. The Fashion System
A. The fashion system consists of all those people and organizations involved in creating
symbolic meanings and transferring those meanings to cultural goods.
1. Fashion can be thought of as a code or language.
2. It is context-dependent. Different consumers interpret the same style differently.
3. Fashion products are often undercoded. There is no one precise meaning, but plenty
of room for interpretation.
4. Fashion is the process of social diffusion by which a new style is adopted by some
group(s) of consumers.
a. A fashion, in contrast, refers to a particular combination of attributes.
b. In fashion means that this combination is currently positively evaluated by some
reference group.
B. Behavioral Science Perspectives on Fashion
1. Fashion operates on many levels; it is simultaneously a societal phenomenon and an
individual one.
2. Many psychological factors help to explain why people are motivated to be in
fashion.
a. These include: conformity, variety-seeking, personal creativity and sexual
attraction
b. An early theory of fashion proposed that “shifting erogenous zones” (sexually
arousing areas of the body) accounted for fashion changes, and that different
zones become the object of interest because they reflect societal trends.
3. Economists approach fashion in terms of the model of supply and demand. Veblen’s
notion of conspicuous consumption applied.
a. Upscale consumers engage in parody display where they deliberately buy
inexpensive products.
b. When high prices create high demand; this is called the prestige-exclusivity
effect.
c. When low prices reduce demand; this termed snob effect.
4. The collective selection model is an example of a sociological approach to fashion.
a. Trickle-down theory has been one of the most influential approaches to
understanding fashion.
i. Two conflicting forces drive fashion: Subordinate groups try to adopt the
status symbols of the groups above them as they attempt to climb up the
ladder of social mobility.
ii. Those people in the superordinate groups are constantly looking below them
on the ladder to ensure that they are not imitated.
b. Trickle-down theory applies to a society with a stable class structure that allows
us to easily identify lower- versus upper-class consumers, which is difficult.
c. Other theories include the trickle-across (where fashions diffuse horizontally
among members of the same social group) and trickle-up (people who lack
prestige can take risks) theories.
5. Meme theory has been proposed to explain the fashion process using a medical
metaphor.
a. A meme is an idea or product that enters the consciousness of people over time.
b. Like a virus that starts out small and spreads by infecting others, memes “leap”
from brain to brain via a process of imitation.
c. A change happens when the process of adoption reaches the moment of critical
mass, or the tipping point.
Discussion Opportunity—Ask: Can you think of items people buy that seem to display their
wealth? How do you know that these people have these items? Can you provide illustrations of
the trickle-across and trickle-up theories?
Discussion Opportunity—Ask: Can you think of a current meme? Explain it and its effect.
D. Cycles of Fashion Adoption
1. Although the longevity of a particular style can range from a month to a century,
fashions tend to flow in a predictable sequence.
2. The fashion acceptance cycle is quite similar to the more familiar product life cycle.
It is shown in Figure 14.4.
*****Use Figure 14.4 Here *****
3. Consider how the fashion acceptance cycle works:
a. There is an introduction stage, an acceptance stage, and a regression stage.
b. The products may be trends, fads, or classics depending on the relative length of
their acceptance cycles.
i. A classic is a fashion with an extremely long acceptance cycle.
ii. A fad is a very short lived, nonutilitarian fashion that spreads impulsively and
rapidly.
c. One can ask certain questions to determine if a fad is occurring vs. a trend.
i. Does it fit with basic lifestyle changes?
ii. What are the benefits?
iii. Can we personalize it?
iv. Is it a trend or a side effect?
v. What other changes have occurred in the market (consider carryover effects)?
vi. Who adopted the change?
VII. Global Consumer Culture
Brands that create a global consumer culture unite people around the world with a common
devotion.
A. It’s a Brand New World
Learning other cultures is essential to a successful marketing effort because ignoring
cultural sensitivities can be costly. Creolization occurs when foreign influences integrate
with local meanings. As corporations compete around the world, we ask should an
organization develop separate marketing plans for each culture or should it craft a single
plan to use everywhere?
B. Adopt a Standardized Strategy
Companies may adopt a standardized strategy, or an etic perspective, which focuses on
commonalities across cultures. These companies take the position that many
industrialized cultures are so homogenized that the same approach will work throughout
the world.
C. Adopt a Localized Strategy
Companies may adopt a localized strategy, or emic perspective, which focuses on
variations across cultures.
1. These companies feel that each culture is unique, with its own value system,
conventions and regulations.
2. This perspective argues that each country has a national character, or a distinctive
set of behavior and personality characteristics, so a marketer should tailor the strategy
to the sensibilities of the culture.
Discussion Opportunity—Ask: If you were in charge of international markets for Kraft Foods,
would you focus primarily on the etic or emic perspectives? Would your answer change if you
worked for Chrysler? Explain.
D. Cross-Cultural Differences Relevant to Marketers
1. Some researchers argue the relevant dimension to consider is consumer style – a
pattern of behaviors, attitudes and opinions that influences all of the person’s
consumption activities – including attitudes toward advertising, preferred channels of
information and purchase, brand loyalty and price consciousness.
2. Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimensions are among the most widely used measures of
cross-cultural values.
Power distance is the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations
and institutions (like the family) accept and expect that power is distributed
unequally.
Individualism is the degree to which individuals are integrated into groups.
Masculinity is the distribution of roles between the genders.
Uncertainty avoidance is society’s tolerance for ambiguity.
Long-term orientation is associated with thrift and perseverance (short-term
values are associated with respect for tradition, fulfilling obligations, saving face).
E. Does Global Marketing Work?
To maximize the chances of success in multicultural efforts that are standardized,
marketers must locate consumers in different countries that share a common worldview
(e.g. people with a more international or cosmopolitan frame of reference; people who
receive information from a worldwide perspective).
1. Affluent people who are “global citizens” (come into contact with ideas from around
the world).
2. There are four segments of consumers:
a. Global citizens (55% of consumers) use global success as a signal of quality and
innovation but are concerned with social responsibility (consumer health,
environment, worker rights).
b. Global dreamers (23% of consumers) see global brands as quality products but
are less concerned with social responsibility than global citizens.
c. Antiglobals (13% of consumers) avoid doing business with transnational firms.
d. Global agnostics (9%) do not base purchase decisions on a brand’s global
attributes.
End-of-Chapter Support Material
SUMMARY OF SPECIAL FEATURE BOXES
1. Marketing Opportunity
Tailgating is big business with many football fans preferring the pre-game party to the
game itself.
2. CB As I See It: Cele C. Otnes, University of Illinois at Urbana – Champaign
Ordinary consumption-laden activities help structure people’s lives and contribute to their
individual and social identities. Rituals include artifacts, scrips, performance roles, and
the ritual audience. When marketers design rituals for customers they rely on all four of
these dimensions, as well as aesthetics of the ritual and the language used.
3. Net Profit
Rituals are migrating online. Alibaba turned a minor Chinese holiday into a blockbuster
sales event and an excuse for online shipping.
4. Net Profit
Marriage rituals have changed with technology, including the words we use to describe
the significant other, and to comment on the preparation for the wedding.
5. Net Profit
M-Pesa is a mobile phone-based money transfer service used in parts of Africa where
many consumers have no access to banks. The app based money transfers transformed
how the local economies relate to the banking industry.
6. Marketing Pitfall
In a paradox of fashion, a brand has cachet because only a select group of people own it.
As more consumers adopt the brand, it is no longer exclusive and the original meaning is
loss. It is a victim of its own success.
7. Net Profit
Memes miners search for themes that emerge on forums, blogs, and video sites, to create
humor that crosses traditional boundaries.
8. The Tangled Web
The internet meme, Slenderman, was used as a reason why a student stabbed another
classmate.
9. CB As I See It: Julien Cayla, Nanyang Business School, Singapore
The way luxury products signal status and relationship vary based on culture. Many
luxury brands build a relationship with consumers based on custom and tradition.
10. Marketing Pitfall
The language barrier creates a problem for marketers who wish to break into foreign
markets, resulting in product names and descriptions that are less than desirable in the
local markets.