Women, Consumption and Paradox

Timothy de Waal Malefyt, Maryann McCabe, Timothy de Waal Malefyt, Maryann McCabe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000052992
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy & Ethics in Science

Women are the world's most powerful consumers, yet they are largely marketed to erroneously through misconceptions and patriarchal views that distort the reality of women's lives, bodies, and work. This book examines the contradictions and mismatches between women's everyday experiences and market representations. It considers how women themselves exhibit paradoxical behaviour in both resisting and supporting conflicting messages. The volume emphasizes paradox as a form of agency and negotiation through which women develop dialogical meanings. The contributions highlight the ways in which women transform inconsistencies and contradictions in advertising and marketing, global consumption practices, and material consumption into positive practices for living. The rich range of ethnographic accounts, drawn from countries including the United States, Brazil, Mexico, Denmark, Japan, and China, provide readers with a valuable perspective on consumer behaviour.

Part I

Gender engagements, consumption interactions and marketplace ambiguities

1

Women and chocolate

Identity narratives of sensory and sensual enjoyment

Maryann McCabe and Timothy de Waal Malefyt

Chocolate enjoys mythic heritage in the United States, based on its exotic Aztec origins, elite status heralded through its spread among the royalty of western Europe during the colonial era and the distinction of hand-craftsmanship using tropical-grown cacao and other rich ingredients in countries such as France and Belgium. Popular accounts of the history and production of chocolate (Coe and Coe 2007; Lopez 2002) provide a panoply of representations from which marketing has culled symbols for branding chocolate. Marketing efforts in the United States have relied on chocolate’s mythic characteristics to reach consumer groups by using such ideas as giving gifts of distinction (Bourdieu 1984) and creating social relations through consumption activities (Miller 1987). This chapter examines the attempt of a global confectionary company to develop and market a new chocolate product to a specific segment of women in the United States. Seeking to carve out unique symbolic space to position the brand against competitors, the company called for ethnographic research to explore the embodied experience of women in its target audience and give shape to its positioning idea.

The ethnographic research we conducted among women who eat chocolate on a daily basis reveals that the ritual of chocolate consumption is an act of full sensory enjoyment that entangles with a charged material agent that is highly transformative. Women find the taste of chocolate alluring, and they use chocolate to transform moods and feelings as part of a regime of self-care in their everyday lives. Chocolate also gives back to women a heightened awareness of themselves through symbolic associations, which render the embodied experience a gift of luxury to the self. Embodiment and dialectical objectivism provide a theoretical avenue for understanding women’s chocolate practices and relations between the body and materiality. Body and chocolate impact each other with a mutuality of effect, as the attributes of chocolate give rise to sensory pleasure in the body while consuming the product leads women to significations of chocolate. Women’s chocolate practices indicate how women engage and move in a gendered world through a continuous process of movement: perceiving, acting and becoming (Ingold 2015).

Our account of marketing efforts to reach a target segment with a new chocolate brand entails a story within a story that reveals the identity-making power of chocolate for women. The outside story will show women capitalized as agents within larger networks of social interaction, patriarchal views of women’s sexuality and the greater assemblage of agents that direct the marketing efforts of a company intent on introducing a new chocolate product into the marketplace. The inside story, however, involves an ethnographic account of cultural practices in which women’s rituals of chocolate consumption occur in secrecy (Simmel 1906). Chocolate consumed alone in the home and with other women, such as one’s mother or sister or close friends, reveals a performance of feminine identity that claims belonging to a gendered class and asserting one’s place in a social hierarchy (Fainzang 2002). In the entanglement between assembled agents – including women, ethnographers, videographers, corporate managers, advertising account planners, material product, brand name and social discourses – representations and misrepresentations concerning the meaning of chocolate in women’s lives contrast an inside story of women’s bodies and experience of chocolate as sensory delight and private identity formation, with an outside story of political discourse objectifying women’s bodies by portraying chocolate as an aphrodisiac to arouse sexual desire. The secrecy surrounding women’s chocolate practices is empowering because it identifies a way that women assert feminine identities, which are affirmed within the boundaries of concealing behavior, in contradistinction to being marketed as sex symbols.

The chapter unfolds with a background section on the company’s aim to develop and market a new chocolate product to a target segment of women in the United States. Following this is our theoretical approach for understanding women’s embodied and dialectical experience of chocolate consumption with its secrecy and performance of femininity – all of which create refrains of enjoyment and transformation as women engage in their everyday lives. Then the chapter presents methodology and findings from ethnographic research. A discussion section reflects on key issues the findings raise in relation to women, materiality, consumption and production.

Background of product development and marketing

Mars Incorporated, the global confectionary company and maker of such iconic brands as M&M’s, Snickers and Skittles, developed a new chocolate product oriented to women and initially introduced the brand to the Australian marketplace in 2007. The product was made with fewer calories than typical for a chocolate bar and marketed with the idea of permissive indulgence for women. According to the brand’s positioning logic, fewer calories would translate into less guilt and more enjoyment for female consumers. The provocative product name, Fling, was intended to carry notions of ‘letting go’ calorie constraints and having guiltless pleasure. Then, planning to bring the brand to the California marketplace in anticipation of a subsequent national rollout, Mars worked with its advertising agency, BBDO, to initiate ethnographic research with its target audience in the United States. The ethnographic research conducted by anthropologists¹ in 2007 intended to explore the concept of ‘fling’ and its resonance with chocolate in relation to women’s consumption experiences. Fling was test-marketed in California in 2009.

Prior to Fling, Mars had not brought a new candy brand to market in 20 years. Impetus for innovation and new product development arose from competition with its main rival, Hershey’s, which had introduced Hershey’s Bliss, an upscale Hershey’s’ Kisses, in 2008 (Parekh 2009). To differentiate Fling from Hershey’s Bliss and Dove Promises, two brands that targeted women with ‘spa retreat’ (Smith 2009), Mars pursued the idea of chocolate as a carefree ‘fling.’ Competing for consumer attention and loyalty, Mars sought to engage consumers through ethnographic research to improve its chances of innovation success. When newly branded products are introduced to a market, they enter an existing social system and need to connect with consumer practices (Desjeux and Ma 2018). The networked interactions between the company, its advertising agency and research participants analyzed in this chapter provide opportunity for exploring how marketing discourse can resonate with target segments or misrepresent the embodied experiences of consumers – and thereby influence the outcome of an innovation plan. This case of women’s chocolate practices highlights women’s agency not only as consumers of products but also as producers of meaning, which involves fashioning identities and meaningful social relations (Graeber 2011).

Theoretical approach

Chocolate is a material object, rich in cultural meaning. From the many material forms in which it is consumed and through multiple associations that empower human and non-human relations, its materiality is highly charged with agency. Its agency is activated through ideological associations, social discourses, embodied sensations and situated occasions that make chocolate central to sensory and sensual enjoyment for women. Consuming chocolate also extends agency into notions of temporality by creating memorable experiences that recall moments of pleasure in eating chocolate from an early age, as well as for generating moments of anticipation in receiving and giving chocolate to self and others as a personal reward or treat. The women in our study revealed an intimate relationship with chocolate in which they appreciate its ability to evoke desires, influence their moods and effect change in their lives.

Below we discuss various concepts of agency in material objects and relate their effects to Daniel Miller’s dialectical theory of objectification (1987, 2005, 2010). Chocolate’s agency influences women’s embodied sensations, enters social discourses and gift exchanges, and forms brand associations that exemplify a dialectic of materialism. This dialectical relationship with chocolate empowers wo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Women, consumption and paradox
• Part I Gender engagements, consumption interactions and marketplace ambiguities
• Part II Histories of gender imageries and practices in flux
• Index