Twenty Million New Customers!

Understanding Gay Men's Consumer Behavior

Steven M Kates

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781317972044
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Most of the world's population is in the dark when it comes to the consumer patterns of gay men. But in Twenty Million New Customers!: Understanding Gay Men's Consumer Behavior, you'll leave all the dark, homophobic myths behind where they belong--in the closet--and come out into the light. In its colorful and informative chapters, you'll see why gay men are a vital consumer lifeline to today's clothing industries as you tap into revealing psychological characteristics that will benefit any business manager. A scholarly yet personal, poignant study, Twenty Million New Customers! is a mixed shopping bag, taking you on a day-in-the-life tour of the buying patterns of 44 gay men. As an up-to-date catalog of scholarly data, it helps you see how "mainstream" businesses can tailor their marketing methods to this rapidly expanding demand in a competent, professional, and ethical manner. As a commentary on lifestyle, it transports you to unexplored consumer behavior territory that most people still consider "deviant." Specifically, you'll read about:

• in-depth, personal interviews from gay consumers
• real-life problems and market needs of gay men
• consumer behavior as political protest
• self-concept, identity, community, and culture
• the creation and maintenance of gay consumer subculture
• research methods and managerial implications of the studyA recent survey estimates that over six percent of U.S. consumers openly acknowledges themselves as gay--clearly a priceless niche. So if you're a gay man trying to get the skinny on the latest bodysuit trends, a marketing scholar involved in quantitative methods research, or a manager interested in retiring your old, outdated business savvy to the closet and exchanging it for a flashy, new, informed sense of marketing pizzazz, read Twenty Million New Customers! It'll shut the closet on the harmful myths surrounding gay consumerism and open the door to success.

Chapter 1

An Ethnographic Study of Gay Men's Consumption

The so-called “deviant” consumer behavior of gays and lesbians is a much neglected focus in the mainstream consumer research literature (Sanders 1989; Wardlow 1996) while consumer perspectives are similarly rare in gay and lesbian studies. One dimension that separates these behaviors from other consumer activities is the acceptance of social risk (Sanders 1989): potentially losing important ties to one's friends, families, occupation, and religion (Goode 1990). Risk, in general, is thought to be the probability that an undesirable result will occur; it is a negative phenomenon which is generally avoided if possible (Celsi, Rose, and Leigh 1993). As many gays and lesbians could confirm, assuming the social risk of being “out” may expose a person to insult; public disgrace and censure; loss of status, income, and social ties; and even physical violence by those who discriminate against the social category in question. This work proposes to explore qualitatively the relationships among self-concept dynamics, gay “subculture” or community, resistance, and deviant consumer behavior.

The Specific Focus of This Book

There are many consumer activities which have the potential to brand an individual as a deviant: drug use, cross-dressing, and compulsive buying to name just a few. This book will primarily address the consumption patterns, habits, and styles of gay men (and their accompanying self-concept and community dynamics) as reflected in their feelings, thoughts, values, and experiences. The implications here are that if an individual engages in certain consumer activities such as going to gay bars, wearing certain types of jewelry or clothing that proclaim one's sexual orientation, or marching in Lesbian and Gay Pride Day, he or she may be publicly labeled as a deviant. These consumer behaviors become a meaningful part of the “coming out” experience of gay men and lesbians. More private forms of consumption such as condom use will not necessarily be studied.

GAY CONSUMPTION

Since the end of World War II, gay enclaves have developed in the heavily urban areas of many large, North American cities (D'Emilio 1983) (although it should be noted that there were informal groups of gay men before this time, particularly in the Greenwich Village area of New York City). These areas are characterized by commercial institutions such as gay bars, bathhouses, bookstores, restaurants, travel agencies, clothing stores, and many other kinds of stores. Yet, gay consumption goes further than this. Many gay men take luxury cruises together, wear provocative T-shirts which both gay and heterosexual individuals are free to read, march in very public Gay and Lesbian Pride celebrations, and purchase and use “off-the-wall” products and services such as leather outfits, exotic body piercings, makeup (which is usually considered rather off the wall when a man purchases it for purposes other than performing on the stage!), and drag items. Of course, heterosexual people consume and buy many of these same products (even leather paraphernalia). However, it is expected that there is an important difference which contrasts “gay” from “straight” consumption, and this difference has largely to do with meaning creation, subculture creation, and identity maintenance. When gay men engage in these various consumer behaviors, they are often defining, articulating, expressing (and sometimes hiding) a deviant identity, one considered offensive to many in U.S. society. In other words, certain consumption lifestyles characterize the gay subculture and perform important identity maintenance functions for its members, such as self-concept change, providing affiliation, and symbolizing pride in one's true self, despite the “sticks and stones” (not to mention unkind words) hurled by prejudiced and hostile others.

The coming-out rite of passage (see Troiden 1989; van Gennep 1960) will be discussed later in this book. This is a key process to understand because “coming out of the closet” is the prescribed manner in which many men who possess significant same-sex desires acquire positive, gay social identities. Most important, as in most important rites of passage, goods and services are transformed into ritual artifacts and consumption rituals, invested with significant symbolic power (e.g., Schouten 1991).

Implicit in the mainstream consumer behavior literature is the notion that there is a congruency between the self-concept and products people buy (Sirgy 1982; Sirgy, Johar, and Wood 1986; Wright, Claiborne, and Sirgy 1992). In other words, the brand image of a good or service must “fit” the individual in order for that person to maintain a positive self-conception and communicate that image to others (Holman 1980, 1981; Solomon 1983). Through purchase and use experiences, goods and services assume important symbolic meanings for individuals who incorporate them into their extended selves (Belk 1988). For example, Schouten's (1991) study of aesthetic plastic surgery found that individuals were motivated by their feelings of inadequacy and their desires to create new, positive, “possible selves” (Markus and Nurius 1986, 1987) through engaging in plastic surgery.

There is another small but growing collection of research both in the consumer literature and in the anthropological literature which has made some progress in understanding deviant consumer practices including tattooing (Sanders 1988; 1989), nonmainstream body alteration (Myers 1992), or in exploring semiotically the consumption patterns of social categories such as punks (Hebdige 1979) or other spectacular youth subcultures (Stratton 1985) who focus much of their time and energy upon the singular pursuit of a particular consumer behavior. Important studies in the mainstream consumer literature include a study of addiction (Hirschman 1992), compulsive buying (O'Guinn and Faber 1989), high-risk leisure activity (Celsi, Rose, and Leigh 1993), Harley-Davidson motorcycle use (Schouten and McAlexander 1995), or upon the survival tactics and unique consumption meanings associated with stigmatized groups such as the homeless (Hill and Stamey 1990; Hill 1991). The literature on deviant consumer behavior might be usefully categorized along the following lines:

Category	Topic, Author
Pathological Consumption	Compulsive buying (O'Guinn and Faber 1989)
Use of Deviant Products	Recreational marijuana use (Becker 1963)
	Tattooing (Sanders 1989)
	Nonmainstream body piercing (Myers 1992)
	Senior citizen discounts (Tepper 1994)
Deviant/Stigmatized Subcultures	Skydiving (Celsi, Rose, and Leigh (1993)
	Harley-Davidson use (Schouten and McAlexander 1995)
	The homeless (Hill and Stamey 1990; Hill 1991)
	Punk style (Hebdige 1979; Fox 1987)
	Bodybuilding (Klein 1985; 1986)
	Youth subcultures (Brake 1985; Rubington 1987; Simmons 1987; Gottdiener 1995)

A review of the literature provokes the following observations. First, there are sets or constellations of consumer behaviors (Solomon 1983; McCracken 1988a) which appear to be lifestyle or subculture defining (or hiding) and which are commonly associated with groups such as punks, openly gay men or lesbians, hippies, or skinheads. What seems to unite these diverse groups is that each possesses a unique set of beliefs and values which are imparted publicly by their consumption styles (Hebdige 1979; McCracken 1986; Schouten and McAlexander 1995). Second, there are significant self-concept dynamics involved in deviant consumer behaviors. Third, these consumers appear to be assuming stigmatized identities (or negative selves) rather than positive, conventional, socially acceptable ones.

This research explores the consumer activities within the Toronto gay men's subculture from a naturalistic research perspective (Lincoln and Guba 1987). This study shares the following with previous efforts: (1) it will study the self-concept dynamics involved with the behaviors; and (2) it will study consumer behaviors that are widely thought of as stigmatized. This study differs from previous efforts in that (1) it will study voluntary consumer behaviors which are very socially risky; (2) it will study phenomenologically a constellation of jointly enacted consumer behaviors which appear to be associated with a particular social identity or subculture (in that they are lifestyle defining or hiding) which are regarded as deviant; and (3) it will study an understudied group of people as consumers—gay men. Hebdige (1979), for example, explored semiotically the political meanings of the punk fashion and style. What he did not do was study this consumer behavior and style at the experiential level of the individual. The other studies in the chart above, moreover, do not really explore voluntary consumer behaviors which, if subject to public disclosure, may have such dire and negative social consequences upon the individual, in that they can associate him or her with a deviant subculture or social category. One could argue that the homeless are involuntarily forced into their circumstances, and that tattoos, skydiving, and piercing are not as intensely stigmatizing as the implication of homosexuality, a widely condemned phenomenon (Goode 1990). This study will make a contribution by gaining a phenomenological understanding of the self-concept dynamics of gay men who engage in socially risky, stigmatized consumer behaviors. In other words, these consumers choose to self-stigmatize. For gay men in particular, coming out is the key rite of passage in constructing a gay identity, and consumer objects and activities are often involved in this process. The Toronto gay subculture is of interest not only for marketers as a consumption venue, but also because it is characterized by visible consumption lifestyles and performs various important identity forming functions for its members.

The research approach is qualitative and naturalistic; data was generated through semistructured personal interviews with gay men and through participant observation at gay consumption venues—bars, events, and the Lesbian and Gay Pride Day festival. A theoretical perspective has been developed, grounded in the data, which describes the findings and the emergent themes and categories.

This study is important for theoretical, pragmatic, and personal reasons. First, as a theoretical contribution, the subcultural defining consumer patterns of gay men, viewed from the perspectives of deviance, have not been studied satisfactorily and related to important issues in consumer behavior such as self-concept dynamics (Solomon 1983; Markus and Nurius 1986, 1987; Belk 1988; Schouten 1991), the affiliative properties of goods and services (Douglas and Isherwood 1979; Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg Halton 1981; Hill and Stamey 1990; Gainer 1992; Celsi, Rose, and Leigh 1993), and the cultural or subcultural impacts on consumer behavior (Hebdige 1979; McCracken 1986; Wallendorf and Arnould 1991; Peñaloza 1994). Often exploring the extreme examples of behavior inform us about its more normal or usual aspects (O'Guinn and Faber 1989; Schouten 1991). Second, the gay and lesbian population is rapidly emerging as a lucrative market segment for businesses (Globe and Mail, August 15, 1992; Fugate 1993; Peñaloza 1996). Third, personally, I am gay and have an enduring interest in the consumer behavior of gays and lesbians.

The following is a brief review of relevant literatures from which I draw various concepts and models for exploring gay urban consumer subculture. Together, these diverse streams of enquiry help provide a meaningful, conceptual, and theoretical background in which to situate and understand the findings of the present study.

DEVIANCE AND DEVIANT SUBCULTURE

The layperson might believe that deviance refers to objective sick, disgusting, or pathological behaviors performed by morally inferior individuals. Rather, deviance refers to any behavior which is widely considered or declared by certain groups or societies to be morally objectionable, sick, disgusting, or of an unconventional nature—a serious breach of societal norms (Rubington and Weinberg 1987; Goode 1990). If deviance is discovered, it usually results in punishment, condemnation, or hostility (Goode 1990). This distinction is important to recognize early on because contemporary perspectives on deviance, such as critical theory and the interactionist/labeling perspective, explicitly consider the participation of various societal audiences when exploring deviant phenomenon. In other words, modern views do not reify deviance; they bracket any moral judgments by declaring deviance a socially constructed phenomenon which is relative to certain groups or societies.

Differing Perspectives on Deviance

Over the last two centuries, a number of perspectives have been developed to explain or understand socially unacceptable or rule-breaking activity: demonology and possession, pathology, the positive school, functionalism, and anomie. These branches of thought attempted to explain why deviance arises in a society which was assumed to be ordered. For functionalist theorists, deviance is a kind of “blessing in disguise” in that its very existence protects the majority of society by ensuring order and by setting moral boundaries of behavior (Matza 1969). In this manner, the traditional family is protected, and members of society come to understand that dire consequences may result if they step beyond certain acceptable limits of behavior. The perspective of the anomie theory or strain theory posits that deviance results from contradictory social structures which dictate standards of success. These structures place restrictive conditions upon the individual to accomplish them conventionally (Merton 1957). The positive school is principally interested in explaining why one individual or category of individuals commits deviant activity while another does not. As Becker (1963) describes this branch of the domain, it is primarily interested in isolating (by experimentation, usually) the one or few isolated psychological traits which determines deviant behavior.

There have been many criticisms of the positive school. First, it ignores the critical dimension of the meaning of subjective experiences (Matza 1969; Goode 1975, 1990; Blumer 1969). Second, critics are skeptical of the concept of causality. Becker (1963), in an example of deviants versus nondeviants, raises the issues that the same “causal,” motivating psychological trait might be present in both deviant and nondeviant subjects, raising the problematic nature of causality. Finally, positivists have been subjected to questions regarding researcher objectivity (Becker 1967).

From these criticisms has arisen a more subjectivist perspective on deviance—the labeling or interactionist school (Becker 1963)—which is more compatible with the humanistic (Hirschman 1986) orientation of this research. It should be noted that labeling does not maintain that psychiatric institutions drive people insane, that prisons cause people to become hardened criminals, or that calling someone a “faggot” causes that individual to engage in same-sex erotic behavior. The premise of the perspective, which developed out of traditional symbolic interactionism (Blumer 1969), is that certain individuals are publicly branded as deviants (Becker 1963) or symbolically label themselves (Pfuhl 1986), and experience and interpret life events through that label. Specific and general audiences of people then behave in a specific manner as to acknowledge the deviant's lower social status and may actually exclude him/her from “normal roles” within a society (Pfuhl 1986). It is interesting to note that an individual need not always undergo a public degradation ceremony (Pfuhl 1986), or ritual such as a trial to assume the role of deviant. Significantly, one can symbolically brand oneself a deviant and internalize a specific label.

The labeling process is critical in understanding the life experiences of individuals who are considered deviant by others and by themselves. Primary deviance is simply the enaction of various proscribed behaviors (Lemert 1951; Pfuhl 1986; Goode 1990). It carries with it no special significance for the individual's general self-concept and is, for the most part, compartmentalized out of the normal life of the man who occasionally experiences a same-sex erotic encounter, for example. Secondary deviance occurs when the individual must cope with either internal self-labeling or societal reaction concerning his/her behavior: “The secondary deviant, as opposed to his actions, is a person whose life and identity are organized around the facts of deviance” (Lemert 1972, p. 63).

The literature in the interactionist perspective suggests that the deviant identity becomes a master status (Pfuhl 1986; Goode 1990) for a “career” deviant, who subsequently adopts the unconventional lifestyle as a matter of course. He/she begins a moral career wherein deviance begets more deviance after public disgrace and condemnation. Pfuhl (1986) calls this phenomenon the “amplification hypothesis” and presents mixed empirical support for such a phenomenon. Overall, he maintains that labeling in itself is sufficient to ensure that those who possess ascribed stigma (i.e., those people whose deviance is highly visible, and in a significant manner defines them to others) launch a deviant career. On the other hand, for those whose stigma is achieved, public labeling is not necessary to set them off on a deviant career (such as homosexuals or drug users). The implication, therefore, is that gay men can explore gay subculture and/or assume gay identities within that subculture without ever having this fact disclosed to potentially condemning others. Thus one can, as a gay man, choose to be a “closet queen” or secret deviant. In this instance, self-labeling (as opposed to public condemnation) appears to be enough for a deviant career to follow.

An important implication of labeling theory is that audiences—the self, family, important reference ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• About the Author
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. An Ethnographic Study of Gay Men's Consumption
• Chapter 2. Meet the Informants
• Chapter 3. The Creation and Maintenance of Gay Consumer Subculture
• Chapter 4. Consumer Behavior and the Construction of Gay Identities
• Chapter 5. Consumer Behavior and the Construction of Gay Communities
• Chapter 6. Consumer Behavior as Political Protest
• Chapter 7. Consumer Behavior, Gay Community, and Identity
• Chapter 8. Managerial Implications of the Study
• Chapter 9. Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Open-Ended Questionaire
• Appendix 2: Specific Probing Questions
• Appendix 3: Informant Data
• Appendix 4: Informants and Consumer Ritual Stages
• Appendix 5: Informants and Conformity Strategies
• Bibliography
• Index