Consumer Tribes

Avi Shankar, Bernard Cova, Robert Kozinets

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136414664
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Marketing and consumer research has traditionally conceptualized consumers as individuals- who exercise choice in the marketplace as individuals not as a class or a group. However an important new perspective is now emerging that rejects the individualistic view and focuses on the reality that human life is essentially social, and that who we are is an inherently social phenomenon. It is the tribus, the many little groups we belong to, that are fundamental to our experience of life. Tribal Marketing shows that it is not individual consumption of products that defines our lives but rather that this activity actually facilitates meaningful social relationships. The social 'links' (social relationships) are more important than the things (brands etc.)The aim of this book is therefore to offer a systematic overview of the area that has been defined as "cultures of consumption"- consumption microcultures, brand cultures, brand tribes, and brand communities. It is though these that students of marketing and marketing practitioners can begin to genuinely understand the real drivers of consumer behaviour. It will be essential to everyone who needs to understand the new paradigm in consumer research, brand management and communications management.

Part I Conceptual foundations

1 Tribes, Inc.: the new world of tribalism

Bernard Cova Robert V. Kozinets and Avi Shankar

DOI: 10.4324/9780080549743-1

Introduction

You hold in your hands a book that spans current thought about the role of the tribal in contemporary commercial society. Its chapters cut across the continents ranging from the philosophical to the grounded, from critical conjecture to ethnographic evidence, sampling a range of tribal identities, activities and practices along the way. In this chapter, we seek to add another conceptual piece to the contemporary jigsaw puzzle that is the current world of tribal consumption by considering some of the powerful tensions between commercial culture and communal collectivities that this book’s topic and its chapters raise.

Consumer Tribes, the title of this book, is difficult and problematic. In the first place, the groups of people we examine in this book are doing far more than what is commonly glossed by the terms ‘consumer’ and ‘consumption’. In common parlance and dictionary definitions, consumers are those who ‘use up’, ‘destroy’ or ‘deplete’ economic goods. But the Consumer Tribes in the chapters of this book are doing far more than that. They do not consume things without changing them; they cannot ‘consume’ a good without it becoming them and them becoming it; they cannot ‘consume’ a service without engaging in a dance with the service provider, where the dance becomes the service. Participatory culture is everywhere.

No doubt there are some people who may take exception to the creativity and agency ascribed to consumers in this book’s chapters. For a start they may say the term ‘consumer’ has become naturalized and normalized, not just within everyday business speak but also in everyday political speak too. From this view, ‘people’ have been turned into ‘consumers’ and are passive victims of the current, dominant mode of the capitalist system – an ideology of neo-liberalism – and its global, corporate juggernauts. To be sure, Marxian inspired theories of hegemony and ideology, although increasingly out of favour these days even within sociological and cultural studies circles, are an important addition to the critical examination of contemporary business practice. Marxian concepts such as commodity fetishism, reification, and commodification still provide perceptive insights for our understanding of a market society. But this passive absorption model of consumers is not what we see in the chapters of this book. Active and enthusiastic in their consumption, sometimes in the extreme, tribes produce a range of identities, practices, rituals, meanings, and even material culture itself. They re-script roles, twist meanings, and shout back to producers and other groups of people while they fashion their own differentiation strategies. They both absorb and resist the pre-packaged, off-the-shelf, brand-and-product meanings of marketers.

So, in the first instance, let’s be clear that Consumer Tribes rarely consume brands and products – even the most mundane ones – without adding to them, grappling with them, blending them with their own lives and altering them. Consumer Tribes do things. Consumers are people, yes, but people who live in a specific social and historical situation. This places them in a co-dependent relationship with commercial culture, one where industrial and post-industrial information economies create not only things, but critical elements of cultural, social, and self-identity, and where those identities are at both the bottom and the top of the proverbial economic–industrial–political pyramid. So let’s be content for the moment in stating that consumers are consumers primarily in that they take commercial identities as important aspects of themselves and their collectives, that they use these identities to relate to themselves, to other people, and to the world around them through lenses that incorporate a vast range of commercial and commercially produced pursuits, objectives and definitions of the self.

And although it is currently in vogue, the term ‘tribe’ opens up yet another a hornet’s nest of unwelcome associations. Perhaps most alluring of all is the notion that by calling a phenomenon ‘tribal’ we have somehow explained it. Like a semantic undertow, Consumer Tribes constantly draws us back to a Rousseauian version of contemporary society: a primitivist longing for better bygone days; a nested and natural nostalgia for a more pristine and closer world, where nature enclosed and emplaced humanity; where small kinlike groups of people bore tighter social bonds and loving links to the Earth; where people were unburdened of repressive social logics and expressed themselves freely and in harmony; where daily life was openly charged with natural animal sexuality; where humans were free to breathe in the animist and transcendent spirit of the world; and finally where people were free to find their True Selves.

Jacques Barzun (2000) reminds us that the idealist vision of the past, of a place of powerful primitive retreat, is a constant cultural component of the Modern Age (for marketer’s take on the retro, see Brown, 2001; Brown and Sherry, 2003; Brown, Kozinets, and Sherry, 2003; Cova and Cova, 2002). In this volume, Robin Canniford and Avi Shankar’s chapter on surf culture examines the construction and allure of the tribal metaphor. They identify how colonial discourse constructed surf culture through tribal tropes and later how commercial culture re-appropriated this tribal symbolism to imbue products and services with a sense of ‘otherness,’ excitement and danger. This otherness, the idea of a wild or natural human state to which we can return, or at least taste a little bit, is a myth whose potency has diminished little over the past 200 years. It refers us to some very important aspects of the phenomena we study here – the hunger of community, expression, transcendence, a natural state (see e.g., Goulding, Shankar, and Elliott, 2002) – and yet it is certainly not the whole story – the Consumer Tribes in this book are less rigid and fixed than their anthropological counterparts.

For the past decade or so, and inspired in part by the application of the theories of one the contributors to this book, Michel Maffesoli (see his chapter in this book), a new understanding of Consumer Tribes has emerged within marketing and consumer research theory. This perspective rejects an atomistic, overly individualistic, information processor view of people as individuals who are to some extent sealed off and separated from their experiential worlds – in short, assumptions underlying the type of research that still dominates the text books, journal articles, and LISREL models of our discipline.

Rather, a variety of studies from both a North American anthropological tradition and a European micro-sociological tradition accept as axiomatic that human life is essentially social. Social life is a rich, complex, kaleidoscopic confusion that cannot ever be represented by ‘causes’ and ‘effects’. Such studies reject analyses of market-based phenomena through the imposition of abstract modernist structures (class, age, gender, and so on), what we can call a top down modernist sociology, in favour of what might be termed a bottom up postmodern sociology. In this view, the building blocks of human social life are not to be found in abstract categories applied to the analysis of social life, but in the multiplicity of social groupings that we all participate in, knowingly or not, through the course of our everyday lives. These tribus or little masses (popularized as neo-tribes) are fundamental to our experience of life in general. They differ from traditional tribes in an anthropological sense in one important way; we belong to many little tribes and not one tribe. From this perspective the consumption of cultural resources circulated through markets (brands, leisure experiences, and so on) are not the sine qua non of contemporary life, rather, they facilitate what are – meaningful social relationships. As Bernard Cova (1997) has argued the ‘links’ (social relationships) are more important than things (brands, products, experiences, ideas).

So it’s clear to say that when taken as some sort of explanation of contemporary practice, Consumer Tribes, our title, obscures more than it reveals. As Henry Jenkins (e.g., Jenkins, 2006) teaches us, our mass mediated world is filled with participatory personalities whose interests coalesce with commercial culture, such as in his example of consumers’ interest in following an American Idol candidate blending extemporaneously and temporarily into tribal affiliations with Coca Cola bottlers around the world. These are relationships of passion and, as Marianna Torgovnick (1996) reminds us, the allure of the primitive, of the tribal, lies in its ability to arouse our desires and passions.

In this chapter, we seek to delve deeper into the rotating cultural currents swirling around these ideas of consumption and production, primitivism and postmodernism, the commercial and the communal, nature and culture, past and present, oppression and liberation, conformity and transcendence, and to see what hybrid forms are born within them. As our headings, we offer statements about Consumer Tribes that form four coherent themes running through the chapters of this book: that Consumer Tribes are activators, double agents, plunderers, and entrepreneurs (see Figure 1.1). Through example and assertion, this introductory chapter circulates through meanings of consumers and tribes as it tracks moments of resistance, co-construction, and transcendence, and finds within them new ways to see the relation of producers consumed, and consumers produced.

Figure 1.1 Mapping Consumer Tribes.

In Figure 1.1, we seek to encapsulate the various identities and associated practices that Consumer Tribes adopt. These range along two continua. The horizontal axis portrays the appropriation axis, the active tendency of Consumer Tribes to poach their creative material from the commercial marketplace, a practice that often gets tribes into trouble. This can range from the minimal appropriation of the double agent identity where, the Tribe enjoys being the target subject, passing on information to brand owners for example, and the distributor of marketplace objects, messages and meanings, to the pirate-like plunderers, who actively play with and shape objects whose rights may belong to other groups, invert and invent meanings, and spread their own messages. On the vertical axis, we have the amount of market annexing or building practices engaged in by the Consumer Tribe. On the low end, this holds the playing-within-the-market identity of the Tribe as an activator, wherein market-based norms and standards are respected, and the Tribe is firmly identified with the role of Consumer. At the high end of the annexation axis is the Consumer Tribe as entrepreneur, actively involved in entering into and expanding the marketplace, on a common footing with commercial producers as a creator of not only cultural and social value, but also economic wealth. Consumer Tribes and their members can move between these different active modalities and identities fluidly, shifting from one form of market interaction to another effortlessly.

Consumer tribes are activators

There are clear tensions revealed by our title of Consumer Tribes. Are people acting in some sense as self-regulating armies of robotic commercial drones or are they vividly alive, dancers on a stage? Are they retreating into an idealized past, or are they intrepid bricoleurs melding and collaging their way through a postmodern present? The reality of course lies somewhere in between these extremes; it is not ‘either or’ but elements of both. They are players as in performers, as in contestants, as in improvisers, supernumeraries, suzerains, overseers. Play activates. Tribes are activators.

Before we can truly explore these notions of play, we need to grapple for a moment with a question of control and freedom. Many contemporary studies of consumers are structured by a polarizing question. This question asks whether consumption involves consumers choosing between two theoretical alternatives. In one, they let themselves be immersed within and submerged by the system of commercial consumption. In the other alternative, consumers are dodgy dissidents who resist the market.

Based on the vision of Consumer Tribes, we would argue that this dichotomy is a poor representation of what consumption actually entails. Of course, these theoretical positions are not only extreme and ideal-typical but also strongly marked by notions of power and opposition (Aubenas and Benasayag, 2002) that pose everyday questions in absolutist terms. We, of course, prefer Absolut markets to absolute ones. Embedded in logics of manipulation and control, the lens given by this dichotomous posing blurs the perception that ‘consumer experience’ is a complex, moment-by-moment, situated occurrence. Lived experience is never simple and binary, but ever-shifting, full of adjustments and hybridizations. To see consumer experience as a choice between slavery and freedom, structure and agency, passivity and rebellion is to use an analytical frame that equates the increasingly subtle techniques of postmodern marketing with the excessive manipulation of consumers.

However, we wish in this volume and beyond to argue for the delineation of ever more subtle, nuanced, dynamic, and complex systems that are at work in the commercial world. In these systems, consumers are not manipulated but engage in tacit compromises (Rémy, 2002). Consumers, in other words, are not näive about living in their commercial–material world: like Madonna, they are commercial–material boys and girls. They know the game plan; they read the playbooks; they know the strategy. Conscious of a partial manipulation, they decide to what extent they will be manipulated and they manipulate too.

Consumers decide to what extent they will appear to be misled, to be truly misled, to remember and to forget, and then mislead, and then manipulate these manipulations in ways that enliven their daily lives and life (Badot and Cova, 2003). ‘The neo-consumer model does not involve an individual who has been manipulated and hypnotized but one who is mobile’ (Lipovetsky, 2003, p. 88) and can play, often simultaneously, at coupling hyper-commercialization with de-commercialization. What we are trying to understand is a process that lacks subjects, whether companies or consumers. Instead, we should be thinking in terms of processes where subjects like companies and consumers exist within the confines of a situation that no one truly controls. This is play, improvizational play, playing by the rules and playing with the rules, playing with the playbook and the other players, all elements that have been noted as important by several consumer researchers over the last decade (e.g., Deighton, 1992; Deighton and Grayson, 1995; Kozinets, Sherry Jr., Storm, Duhachek, Nuttavuthisit, and DeBerry-Spence, 2004).

The central tensions of consumption and production seem almost to contain within them the links to rituals of resistance and opposition, yet these rituals all too often turn out to be playful, hollow or bereft of real animosity or vigour. This disappoints some (perhaps many) researchers, whose own ideological stands tend to lead them to seek rebellious consumers, activists who will change the system. Yet the dialectics of tribes and tribalism are often equal parts playful and liberatory, a place where struggles against the system are cloaked less in ideologies of resistance and more in identities of liberation. They often take place in the context of a complex social process ever unfolding whose significance lies not in the value of its players’ transactions but in the transaction of its play values.

We can see the metaphor of Consumer Tribes as players who activate and enliven a social process of commercial meanings and identity production– consumption. This theme runs strongly through many...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• PART I CONCEPTUAL FOUNDATIONS
• PART II TRIBES AS ACTIVATORS
• PART III TRIBES AS DOUBLE AGENTS
• PART IV TRIBES AS PLUNDERERS
• PART V TRIBES AS ENTREPRENEURS
• Index