Consumer Social Values

Eda Gurel-Atay, Lynn R. Kahle, Eda Gurel-Atay, Lynn R. Kahle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781315283715
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Social values are central to people's lives, guiding behaviors, and judgments, and defining who we are. This book advances understanding of consumer social values and their roles in the global marketplace by refining and directing existing knowledge of consumer behaviors.

With a diverse set of contributors from different parts of the world, this engaging collection provides a unique examination of social values through cross-cultural research. It incorporates input from researchers with varying academic backgrounds from marketing to psychology and philosophy, and also focuses on a range of methodological approaches including surveys, ethnography, interviews, semantic analysis, and neuroscience. The book introduces innovative concepts and provides comprehensive coverage of several specialized areas, to offer an important contribution to values research and discussion. Key topics include values and choice; means-end chains; relations among goals; motives; religion and personality; value measurement and values related to specific services and industries.

Consumer Social Values is an essential resource for scholars, students, and practitioners of consumer psychology and marketing communications.

SECTION II

Specific Applications of Values Research and Theory

Values guide behaviors and judgments across specific situations, including consumer behaviors, politics, and lifestyles. Accordingly, this section introduces examples of values research and values theory applications.

Patara and Tanskul introduce the concept of self-sufficiency and suggest that self-sufficiency values (SSV) may dilute the negative influence of materialism on happiness. After developing a scale of SSV based on a “middle path” that is embedded in Buddhist teaching, Patara and Tanskul look at the relations among materialism, social support, self-sufficiency, and happiness. Their findings show that those consumers who are self-sufficient are happier with their lives, regardless of their exposure to materialistic values. The authors suggest that self-sufficiency can also guard against other negative effects of materialism.

Haberstroh and Orth examine how self-construal influences consumer response to marketing visuals. More specifically, the authors suggest that visual harmony is more attractive to people with an interdependent, compared to independent, self-construal. Because visual harmony is perceived as a congruent pattern or arrangement of parts that combines symmetry, balance, and proportion, it is more consistent with a collective self, viewing oneself in agreeable relationships with others. Based on experimental data from seven countries, the authors found that interdependent self-construal indeed enhances the positive effect of design harmony on consumer evaluation of attractiveness. This finding will help marketing managers and product designers to employ visual design across cultures that have different social and cultural values.

Ulusoy and Barretta examine the value systems and their effects on the process of fragmentation in the culture and the development of the subcultural ethos. Specifically, the authors argue that the problems (social, cultural, and environmental) associated with the mainstream culture lead to discontentment with and resistance to the mainstream culture. As a result, people start the quest for social and cultural transformation as well as the quest for the alternative identities and self-expression. This quest eventually leads to the fragmentation of the mainstream culture through subcultures. As an example, Ulusoy and Barretta discuss how some of the values from the List of Values (Kahle, 1996) may mean different things to the members of subcultures.

Larsen and Kahle examine the success of the Independent DIY (Do It Yourself) Lifestyle Blogging Business model through the Indie Girl Culture (IGC). More specifically, the authors analyzed how three historical movements (i.e. the Handmade movement, the Arts and Crafts movement, and the punk subculture) combined with progressive marketing theories (i.e. Permission Marketing and Relationship Marketing), and made possible with the new opportunities created through the Internet (i.e. blogs and social media), helped to develop the Independent DIY Lifestyle Blogging Business model.

Reynolds outlines a detailed explanation of how political strategy is developed and uses this explanation as a framework for developing more predictive polling methods. He suggests that, similar to creating effective advertising strategies to create purchase intent, the new polling methodology should be based on voter decision segmentation (the core principle of strategy development) and a decision model grounded by personal values.

Rose, Merchant, Rose, Bakir, and Gentina outline a series of studies exploring attitudes toward money. By using a four-dimensional scale (i.e. achievement, status, worry, and security) to measure symbolic money attitudes and a variety of qualitative and quantitative techniques (e.g. focus groups, depth interviews, and surveys) to collect data, the authors explore the meanings of, and attitudes toward, money in different cultural settings. Accordingly, their research has produced a rich and diverse set of cross-cultural findings that compliment and supplement the findings of research on personal values.

Lee and Kahle reviewed studies that looked at how values and social media usage are related. In one study, Lee and Kahle (2016) analyzed over 20,000 tweets across four Major League Baseball teams and four sports apparel companies and found significant differences in the communication of values. In another study, the authors found that people who endorse certain values (e.g. a sense of belonging, fun, and enjoyment in life) are more likely to spend time on social media. Lee and Kahle concluded that social media offer a lens into the communication of values and thus should be examined more in the future.

3

SELF-SUFFICIENCY AND MATERIALISM

Scale Development and Its Implications

Yupin Patarapongsant* and Nicha Tanskul

The rise of materialism has shifted our values toward having and owning to display social status or to have material possessions to substitute for relationships. Somehow, these material possessions eventually have been perceived as our Holy Grail of personal happiness. While a constant feed of material consumption and possession may provide a viable short-term solution for momentary happiness, it also deteriorates our long-term happiness and subjective well-being. We propose that there is another viable approach, which could lead to more sustainable long-term happiness through the adoption of SSV. SSV conceptualized as the quality of feeling secure and content with one’s ability. The measurement developed in our study was derived from the concept of sufficiency in the literature from psychology, consumer behavior, economics, and economic development.

Background

Back in 1932, Bernreuter pioneered in defining self-sufficiency trait as one’s ability to live independently from others regarding the ordinary affairs of life. His self-sufficiency measurement was developed and tested against student subjects and demonstrated that students living away from home scored higher in self-sufficiency than those who lived at home, and male students scored higher than female students did. Follow-up research has defined self-sufficiency as one of the traits in the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) (Foster & Campbell, 2007; Raskin & Terry, 1988). In the subscale of the NPI, self-sufficiency captures awareness of one’s own actions, ability to achieve something without help from others, and certainty in one’s ability (Raskin & Terry, 1988). Recent research has defined someone who is self-sufficient as the one who has the ability toward personal goals or emphasis on behaviors of his or her own choosing accomplished without active involvement from others. Thus, being in a self-sufficient state would mean being hesitant to allow others to involve themselves in one’s activities (Vohs, Meed, & Goode, 2006, 2008).

From an economic perspective, John Maynard Keynes (1933) introduced the concept of national self-sufficiency, which refers to the way that countries rely on their own economy rather than international trade. Recently, the United Nations Development Program [UNDP] (2007) also suggested the concept of sufficiency economy, which involves the concepts of moderation, reasonableness, and self-immunity (knowledge and integrity). The aim is to take the middle path, or middle way, from Buddhist principles as guidance in making economic decisions. Specifically, the middle path, the balance, or moderation between the otherwise polarized extremes (Kumar, 2002; Marlatt, 2003) is a guideline for developing the economy to keep up with globalization. There are three levels of sufficiency economy according to this principle. The fundamental sufficiency economy philosophy refers to the lifestyle of individuals, a group, or a small community, which places emphasis on self-reliance and work according to one’s lifestyle without greed and taking advantage of others. The progressive sufficiency economy refers to mutual benefits of exchanges and cooperation among those in the community to attain community development and societal advancement. Finally, the network sufficiency economy refers to the extension of the sufficiency economy concept to macroeconomic policy.

In addition, we also investigate the concept of mindful consumption (Sheth, Sethia, & Srinivas, 2011), which overlaps with the concept of sufficiency economy in terms of the mindful mind-set in making consumption decisions.

Scale Construction

Item Generation and Initial Refinement

A Likert scale of SSV was developed based on the three conceptual thoughts, namely self-sufficiency (Foster & Campbell, 2007; Raskin & Terry, 1988; Vohs et al., 2006, 2008), the concept of mindful consumption (Sheth et al., 2011), and sufficiency economy according to United Nations Development Program (UNDP, 2007). As mentioned earlier, someone who is self-sufficient has been defined as the one who has the ability toward personal goals (Vohs et al., 2006, 2008). According to the concept of consumption stated by Sheth et al. (2011), consumption actually is composed of tangible and intangible aspects. The tangible aspect is consumption behavior, while the intangible aspect is consumption mind-set. The consumption mind-set is the attitude, values, and expectations surrounding consumption behavior. The consumption mind-set is important because it affects consumption choice as well as how consumption has been interpreted. Mindful consumption in this case refers to the consciousness in thought and behavior regarding the consequences of consumption. The mindful mind-set refers to consumers’ conscious caring toward self, community, and nature, while mindful behavior refers to a restraint from acquisitive consumption (consumption that exceeds one’s needs or one’s capacity to consume), repeated consumption (consumption that involves the circle of buying, discarding, and buying again), and aspirational consumption (consumption that is linked to an upward shift in consumer aspirations). Hence, consumers are more likely to make comparisons with others whose incomes are three to five times their own. In the case of sufficiency economy, as suggested by the UNDP (2007), the conceptualization of this construct contains three components: moderation, reasonableness or insights, and self-immunity system. First, the concept of moderation is focused on the idea of the middle path between basic needs and extravagance. Thus, moderation is intertwined with both the acquisitive consumption concept and the aspirational consumption concept under the big umbrella of mindful consumption. Second, the concept of reasonableness is based on the idea of evaluating the reasons for any action and understanding its consequences toward self, society, and environment. Thus, reasonableness is intertwined with the overarching approach of mindful consumption, which focuses on consumers’ conscious caring toward self, community, and nature. Finally, the self-immunity concept is focused on consumers’ ability to cope with unpredictable or uncontrollable events and circumstances. Besides these three components, sufficiency economy according to UNDP also requires two additional components, which are knowledge and integrity. With these combined concepts of self-sufficiency, mindful consumption, and sufficiency economy, the 50 Likert-type statements with a seven-point response scale were developed, ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree).

The initial list was given to panels of experts composed of two marketing professors and two industry experts. These experts were given the definition of the construct and asked to rate each item as a very good, good, fair, or poor representation of its content. According to responses from the experts, 16 items were retained. The 16 items were rated very good by at least three of the judges and poor by none of the judges. Thus, based on experts’ judgment on the meaning of these items, we proceeded with a preliminary 16-item scale of SSV.

The items were arranged in a randomized order. The scale was identified as a measure of values toward self-sufficiency and administered to 430 nationally representative samples in Thailand. The survey is approximately 15 minutes in length and was administered through a telephone interview.

Items Reduction

Initial analyses involved items-to-remaining total correlation and principal components exploratory factor analysis. Three out of the 16 items were dropped due to item-to-remaining total correlations of less than .50. The remaining items were factor-analyzed. The resulting factor loadings and scree plot indicated four dominant factors with 11 items. A subsequent factor analysis on these 11 items ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Section I Key Issues in Social and Cultural Values
• Section II Specific Applications of Values Research and Theory
• Section III Spiritual Aspects of Values
• Section IV Methodological Approaches
• Notes on Contributors
• Author Index
• Subject Index