The Middle Class in Emerging Societies

Consumers, Lifestyles and Markets

Leslie L. Marsh, Hongmei Li

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317510758
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziale Klassen & wirtschaftliche Ungleichheit

This volume examines the discursive construction of the meanings and lifestyle practices of the middle class in the rapidly transforming economies of Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, focusing on the social, political and cultural implications at local and global levels. While drawing a comparative analysis of what it means to be middle class in these different locations, the essays offer a connective understanding of the middle class phenomenon in emerging market economies and lay the groundwork for future research on emerging, transitional societies. The book addresses three key dimensions: the discursive creation of the middle class, the construction of the cultural identity through consumption practices and lifestyle choices, and the social, political and cultural consequences related to globalization and neoliberalism.

Section II
Economics and Consumers

4 Meanings Attached to Cruises by Emerging Consumers

A Study Using Participant Observation

Ana Raquel Coelho Rocha and Angela da Rocha

Introduction

This research aimed to study the meanings attached to cruises by consumers who recently moved from poverty to the middle class in Brazil. Marketing scholars have only now started to study this new segment of consumers in order to understand better their desires and aspirations, as they increasingly have access to credit and expand their consumption. The behavior of upwardly mobile consumers is becoming an important research topic because this phenomenon – the emergence of a large middle class from poverty – has become increasingly apparent and manifests in several developing countries, such as China, India, Turkey, South Africa, and some Latin American countries. It is estimated that over 1 billion people have recently entered consumer markets. In the case of Brazil, an estimated 30 to 40 million (15 to 20 percent of the Brazilian population) have moved up from the bottom of the pyramid into the middle class.

Several criteria have been used in Brazil to define those who belong to the middle class. For the Secretariat of Strategic Affairs (Brazil 2012), the Brazilian middle class comprises those families whose income per capita falls between the 34th and the 82nd percentile of the population’s income distribution. Another classification used by firms and research institutes is the Critério Brasil (The Brazil Criteria). Both classification systems divide the middle class into three segments: low-middle class, middle-middle class, and upper-middle class. Table 4.1 compares the average monthly income used by both classification systems for each middle-class stratum.

Table 4.1 Middle-Class Strata in Brazil (Average Monthly Family Income in USD)

Strata	SAE Classification	Critério Brasil
Low-middle class	845	950
Middle-middle class	1,056	1,582
Upper-middle class	1,544	2,724

Source: Brazil 2012: 8.

Note: converted from reais to dollars based on the April 1, 2012 exchange rate.

This study looks at a specific phenomenon resulting from the emergence of a substantial number of individuals from poverty to the middle class. We adopt the term “emerging consumer” to designate this group. Although they tend to belong to the lower income stratum of the middle class, this is not necessarily the case. The relevant issue for the present study is not, therefore, the segment of the middle class they now belong to, but rather the fact that they only now have access to new types of leisure consumption and, specifically, to maritime cruises.

In fact, the consumption of leisure products is one of the characteristics of the phenomenon under study. Poor consumers do not have access to leisure products, and their consumption is often defined as pre-industrial; that is, limited to public spaces and family gatherings. Therefore, as consumers emerge from poverty, leisure is one of the areas in which they want to spend part of their discretionary income. Cruises are an outstanding example of a leisure product that has recently attracted the attention of this segment of the Brazilian population. A market study by Abremar, the Brazilian Association of Maritime Cruises (2012), showed that 63 percent of cruise travelers during the years 2010 and 2011 had their first experience with cruises and 87 percent intended to repeat. Approximately 45 percent of the travelers had a monthly family income of less than US$ 2,500, and 15 percent of less than US$ 1,250.

However, despite the growing importance of interpretive research in marketing (e.g. Denny 2006; Holbrook 2006), few studies have looked at the meanings of leisure, and even fewer have focused on how consumers from emerging markets create meanings from leisure. Venkatesh (2006) looked at meanings associated to leisure trips and devised a model that views leisure as a function of personality, motives, attitudes and context. However, although the author based part of his arguments on phenomenological studies, the proposed model was positivist, and, therefore, incapable of grasping the meanings consumers attach to leisure. In contrast, the work of Celsi et al. (1993) and Moutinho et al. (2007), exemplify the interpretive approach in marketing studies. In fact, there is a growing interest in the use of interpretive methods in the area of leisure studies (for example, Sharpe 2005; Shipway and Jones 2008; Yarnal 2004) as well as in other areas of social studies (e.g. Markula 1997; McDonald et al. 2011; Sletten 2010).

Scholars have called for more research on the consumption patterns of emerging middle-class consumers from developing countries (e.g. Üstüner and Holt 2010). This study looks specifically at the meanings attached to maritime cruises by emerging consumers belonging to the Brazilian middle class. Given the goal of understanding symbolic aspects of consumption, participant observation followed by in-depth interviews was the research method elected for the study.

Theoretical Background

Symbolic meanings attached by consumers to products and services change the nature of the offer to incorporate elements that, to a large extent, surpass its pure utilitarian value (Barbosa and Campbell 2006; McCracken 2003; Sherry Jr. 1995). Meanings associated to products and services can include issues such as identity, identification, self-image, distinction, socialization, or belonging. Consumers use products and services to speak about themselves and their relationship to others, as well as to participate in a socially constructed world. Consumption is, therefore, used both as a means of constructing social reality and as a means of (re)constructing the self. Because consumers typically have limited resources at their disposal, they have to be discerning in the choice of meanings to consume (Elliot 1997). Elliot calls attention to the intrinsic difficulty of studying symbolic representations, claiming that (i) they involve not only the symbol itself but also what the individual attaches to the symbol, and (ii) these representations can only be partially verbalized.

Holt (1995: 1) recognizes the use of three metaphors in the interpretive literature on consumer behavior – consumption as experience, consumption as integration, and consumption as classification – to which he adds a fourth, consumption as play. He used these four dimensions to study how spectators consume a baseball game. In this study, we started from these four categories to structure our analysis of participants in a maritime cruise.

Consumption as Experience

As pointed out by Holt (1995), the literature on hedonic consumption focuses more on the psychological processes (e.g. emotional states) associated to consumption and, therefore, looks at consumption more as an individual than a social phenomenon. Research on experiential consumption was pioneered by Hirschman and Holbrook (1982). Although still anchored, to some extent, in the traditional consumer behavior literature, with foundations in the fields of psychology and psychoanalysis, their work on hedonic consumption is mainly rooted on a phenomenological perspective of consumption. The key issues associated to hedonic consumption, according to this stream of research, are that (i) consumption has meanings that transcend the utilitarian value of a product or service; (ii) consumers’ emotions prevail over rationality; and (iii) hedonic consumption is attached to a subjective construction of reality. The consumption experience was summarized by these authors as “fantasies, feelings and fun” (Holbrook and Hirschman 1982: 132). Campbell (1987: 85) suggests that a modern view of hedonism (which he named “autonomous imaginative hedonism”) places the individual “as an artist of the imagination, taking images from memory or the environment and rearranging them.” Such process, according to Campbell, is completed with the possession of the object or the usage of the service. However, consumers may or may not be satisfied depending on whether their expectations were met. When dissatisfied (which will be often the case since reality rarely meets anticipated imageries of an experience), consumers engage in the pursuit of “a new object of desire” (86). Campbell’s view implies that consumers tend to be constantly frustrated and to substitute one dream by another in an almost unending search for pleasure, or satisfaction.

Emerging middle-class consumers should have an anticipatory view of the experience on a cruise, which is, to some extent, an elaboration of previous images collected from the social environment, as well as those produced by the media (including advertising and movies). These consumers will tend to elaborate further on this image by adding elements or rearranging those already in the memory to construct an anticipated image of a cruise. Once the cruise experience is over, they may be satisfied or dissatisfied, resulting in their desire for further cruises or their seeking other experiences.

Consumption as Integration

The second metaphor, consumption as integration, refers to how consumers actively engage in the process of creating and transferring social meanings. McCracken (1986) proposed an explanatory framework to describe the process, whereby meanings residing in the culturally constituted world are transferred to goods. Consumers then take possession of goods and transfer those meanings to their own selves. The instruments of meaning transfer from the culturally constituted world to products and services are advertising and the fashion system, through several agents that “gather up cultural meaning and effect its transfer to consumer goods” (77). Advertising as a cultural product is seen as providing consumers “with the opportunity to construct, maintain and communicate identity and social meanings” (Elliot 1997: 285). Once product “qualities” are incorporated into goods, the final step has to be taken by the consumer, who is the one responsible for transferring these meanings to their own life via ritualistic behavior.

According to McCracken (1986), rituals are activities performed by consumers to transfer to their lives symbolic properties that are associated to consumption artifacts (i.e. products and services). Rituals have specific norms that give directions as to how people should engage and behave during the ritualistic event (Üstüner, Ger, and Holt 2000). While performing rituals, consumers may use symbolic artifacts, follow predefined scripts, and perform specified roles to an audience (Rook 1985). Whereas not all these elements are necessary for a set of symbolic activities to be considered a ritual, their presence is considered an indication of the vitality of a ritual.

Rites of passage are one of the ways by which consumption is used to express the passage from one state to another, such as wedding ceremonies (Holt 2000), or plastic surgery by women undergoing role transitions (Schouten 1991). Shared celebratory occasions, such as Christmas (Tynan and McKechnie 2009) and Thanksgiving (Wallendorf and Arnould 1991), are also occasions in which consumers actively engage in ritualistic behavior to construct social meanings. Whereas traditional rituals are typically more stable and rigid, in modern societies, although more flexible and plastic, rituals are often the loci “where conflicting world-views converge.” Accordingly, rituals may be used “as cultural resources to define new social boundaries” (Üstüner, Ger, and Holt 2000: 213). Integration can be achieved also by “adapting one’s identity to fit institutionalized meanings through assimilating and producing practices” (Holt 1995: 14), as consumers adjust their selves to perform certain roles and follow existing scripts.

In the case of emerging middle-class consumers, one can expect that certain events – such as the participation in their first maritime cruise – be used symbolically to commemorate the passage from poverty to the middle class. We also expect that emerging middle-class consumers should be concerned with three elements of ritual behavior (artifacts, scripts, and roles) in maritime cruises insofar as they are novices in this type of consumption.

Consumption as Classification

The third metaphor, consumption as classification, looks at “consuming as a process in which objects – viewed as vessels of cultural and personal meanings – act to classify their consumers” (Holt 1995: 2). The classificatory nature of consumption, inspired by a long-standing tradition of sociological studies (e.g. Bourdieu 1979), has been used in interpretive consumer research to show how possessions are used by consumers to say something about themselves and to distinguish themselves from others (e.g. Mehta and Belk 1991). It should be noted, however, that traditional economic theory also has taken into account positional consumption, which is described by economists as demonstration effects, impacting more heavily on those with relatively low incomes (Frank 1985; Veblen 2000).

Bourdieu (1979) posited that economic capital and cultural capital are behind the differences among classes. People belonging to the higher classes tend to have a larger amount of economic and cultural capital than those belonging to the lower classes. Cultural capital is a key element to understand how consumption differs among social classes. Cultural capital permits one to choose, use, or consume products that require certain knowledge and learned skills. Taste, that is, is “the propensity and capacity to appropriate (materially or symbolically) a given class of classified, classifying objects or practices” (Bourdieu 2006: 295), is the mechanism by which material and cultural goods are changed into signs of a distinctive lifestyle. The choice of objects and the ways of using or consuming them are, therefore, quite homogeneous within a social group. Those that come from the same social standing have similar cultural capital and similar lifestyles and, therefore, “have every chance of having similar dispositions and interests, and thus of producing practices that are themselves similar” (Bourdieu 1989: 17). Accordingly, a system of differences is built around the ways an individual relates ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Global Middle Classes: Towards the Study of Emergent Citizenship
• SECTION I Media and Society
• SECTION II Economics and Consumers
• SECTION III Politics and Ideology
• List of Contributors
• Index