Chapter

2. Chapter 5 The Meaning and Nature of Culture

3. Learning Objectives After completing this chapter, you should be able to: • Understand the meaning and nature of culture. • Discuss the ideas of cultural blueprints, categories, and principles. • Explain why the fact that culture is learned is significant to marketers. • Describe the importance of cultural values to consumer behavior and some ways of measuring cultural values.

4. Learning Objectives (continued) • Give some examples of cultural myths and symbols and marketing’s role in reproducing them. • Explain and identify some examples of consumer rituals. • Explain cultural creolization and the role of marketing in this process.

5. The Baby Jogger Will it diffuse in other cultural contexts?

6. Exhibit 5.1Two Views of Culture and Consumer Behavior

7. Meaning and Nature of Culture Culture consists of shared blueprints or schemas both for action and for understanding. • Cultural categories • organize time, space, nature, and the human community • Cultural principles • values, norms, and beliefs that allow things to be grouped into cultural categories, ranked, and interrelated Marketing challenge: aligning products with cultural blueprints, categories, and principles.

8. Cultural Values • Cultural values are those shared broadly across a society, values that are conditioned at the society level and reinforced and augmented at successive subcultural levels. • Instrumental values • shared beliefs about how people should behave and desired end states. • Terminal values • desirable life goals

9. Cultural Values (continued) • Value-Attitude-Behavior Hierarchy • abstract values affect midrange attitudes that led to specific consumer behaviors • Value measures • Rokeach Value Survey (RVS) • List of Values (LOVs) • Consumer ethnocentrism • preference for one’s own system of tastes and preferences over those of another cultural group • Materialism • importance consumer attaches to worldly possessions or consumption-based orientation to happiness seeking

10. A Comparison Between Brazil and The U.S. on a Few Rokeach Terminal Values Terminal Value Brazil 1988 U.S. 1981 Overall Rank Overall Rank True Friendship 1 10 Mature Love 2 14 Happiness 3 5 Inner Harmony 4 13 Family Security 7 1 A World at Peace 5 2 Freedom (independence) 6 3 Self-Respect 9 4 Source: Wagner A. Kamakura and Jose Afonso Mazzon (1991), “Value Segmentation: A Model for the Measurement of Values and Value Systems,” Journal of Consumer Research, 18 (September), 208-218.

11. Cultural Myths and Symbols • Myth • a story containing symbolic elements that express shared emotions and cultural values, maintain social order by authorizing a social code • Urban legends • stories passed by word of mouth that purport to be nearly first hand accounts of real events, but are fictions • Cultural symbols • objects that represent beliefs and values • Conspicuous consumption • acquisition and visibility of “luxury” goods and services to demonstrate one’s ability to afford them

12. Cultural Rituals • Repetitive behavioral sequences • Taken-for-granted scripts • Exhibit arbitrary patterns • Incorporate values • Sustain social consensus • Integrate interpersonal behaviors • Examples include entry, exit, grooming, support, possession, exchange, divestment

13. Cultural Rituals (continued) • Cultural rituals • behaviors that occur in a relatively fixed sequence, and that tend to be repeated periodically • Possession rituals • when products move from the marketplace to the home or workplace • Grooming rituals • private behaviors that aid in the transition from private to public self and back again • Divestment rituals • occur when consumers relinquish possession of objects

14. Cultural Rituals (continued) • Exchange rituals • Holiday gift giving • Rites of passage • Life cycles of rituals • Global consumption of rituals

15. Chinese Moon Festival • On the 15th day of the 8th month of the lunar calendar • The custom of paying homage to the fairy and Jade rabbit is gone, but moon cakes are showing improvement every year. There are hundreds of varieties of moon cakes on sale a month before the arrival of the Moon Festival. Some moon cakes are of very high quality and very delicious. An overseas tourist is advised not to miss it if he or she happens to be in China during the Moon Festival. • http://www.chinavista.com/experience/moon/moon.html moon cake

16. Guidelines for Cultural Awareness • Culture is an all-encompassing phenomenon. • Culture is learned. • Enculturation • process of learning culture • Acculturation • process of learning a new or foreign culture through a direct or indirect experience of others • Culture is patterned. • It is repeated and reinforced throughout the society • It is reaffirmed and renewed through ritual consumption experience • It tells us what things connect with what other things

17. Guidelines for Cultural Awareness • Diderot effect • force that encourages an individual to maintain a cultural consistency in his/her complement of consumer goods • Culture is adaptive and dynamic • Culture is an open system • it influences and is influenced by changes in their environment

18. 1950s U.S. Kitchen Appliances

19. Traditional English Living Room

20. Danish Modern Living Room

21. Plate of Sushi

22. The Diderot Effect • Have you ever bought a pair of shoes…? • Moral force that encourages an individual to maintain a cultural consistency in his/her complement of consumer goods.

23. Diderot Effect: Managerial Implications

24. Globalization, Consumer Culture, and Cultural Creolization • Consumer culture • 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 • Characteristics of culture: • Global expansion • Increasing materialism • Parallel changes in personal identity • Movement of economic migrants, religious pilgrims, and guest workers between developing world and cosmopolitan

25. Globalization, Consumer Culture, and Cultural Creolization (continued) Trends: • Global spread of brands and consumption practices • Creolization • consumption patterns that combine elements of local and foreign consumption traditions • Nostalgic defense • ethnocentric consumer reaction against globalization, rejecting foreign consumption consumption and values • Increasing consumption of presumably authentic cultural products from transitional and Third World cultures

26. G.W. Cultural Symbols • Cultural symbols are shared symbolic meanings. • Culture is reflected in core symbols. • Consumer goods often become core symbols in a culture. Taj Mahal Mt. Fuji Danbø

27. Contemporary Herero Costume, Botswana

28. Brand Symbols: Bibendum, The Michelin Man

29. Some Brand Symbols = Cultural Symbols

30. Goods Become National Symbols

31. acculturation conspicuous consumption consumer ethnocentrism core symbols culture cultural categories cultural principles cultural rituals cultural symbols Diderot effect divestment rituals enculturation exchange rituals grooming rituals Hofstede’s worker values instrumental values List of Values (LOV) materialism myths norms open systems possession rituals Key Terms

32. rites of passage Rokeach Value Survey (RVS) terminal values urban legends value-attitude-behavior hierarchy values Key Terms (continued)