The Routledge Companion to Consumer Behavior

Michael R. Solomon, Tina M. Lowrey, Michael R. Solomon, Tina M. Lowrey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315526911
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Comportamento dei consumatori
• Index: Business

The key to marketing is understanding and satisfying consumer needs, thus a knowledge of consumer behavior is essential to any organization dealing with customers, users, or clients. This book promises to be a contemporary classic. It brings together an international set of scholars, many of whom are "household names", to examine the diverse approaches to consumer behavior topics.

The editors employ a micro to macro structure, dividing each topic into three parts: one reflecting foundational work, one focused on emerging trends, and one covering practical applications. Each part examines the relationship between consumer behaviour and motivation, including well-being, gender, social class, and more, and concludeswith practitioner perspectives on the challenges and opportunities that come with understanding customers. Readers will gain insight into how drives that are constantly in flux relate to other aspects of human cognition and behavior, allowing them to reach customers successfully, and to meet their needs. With contributions from leading scholars, including Sidney Levy and Jagdish Sheth, this volume sets the standard as the most comprehensive, cutting-edge resource on the subject of consumer behavior.

Students of consumer behaviour and marketing will find this a useful exploration of a fast-moving field, fundamental to the welfare of companies, government, non-profits, and consumers. It will also benefit new and established academic researchers as well as practitioners who want to stay on top of current knowledge.

PART I

Introduction

1

A HISTORY OF THE STUDY OF CONSUMER BEHAVIOR

Sidney J. Levy

DEPARTMENT OF MARKETING, UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA, TUCSON, AZ, USA

When Michael Solomon invited me to contribute to this volume, he suggested that I might tell what I think a scholar in the field of Consumer Behavior (CB) should know about what has been done, and what needs to be done in the future. I appreciate the generosity of the invitation. I will take his suggestion as a mandate and try to fulfill it. In doing so I will explain what I think is the domain of the study of consumer behavior, how it has been studied in the past, and how my own awareness and study of consumption came about. Then I will note the current nature of such study and where it might go.

My interest in history was stimulated and inspired by my World History class in high school and exposure in college to Herodotus, known as the “father of history” and Thucydides, known as the “father of scientific history.” Both wrote in the 5th century BCE about war, among the Greeks and between the Greeks and the non-Greek, telling of their travels and data-gathering. I have thus similarly written about the field of marketing and consumer behavior and my role in thinking about it, given different contexts and purposes, including my travels and methods of data-gathering (Levy 2015a, 2014a,b, 2006, 2003).

When we speak of consumer behavior, we commonly have in mind the things that people buy for food, shelter, and clothing, with consuming especially meaning using something up as in eating. But modern understanding of consumption does not actually exclude anything that is consumed by the body or mind. That is to say, all behavior is a form of consumption of some kind. Given that fact, it is of interest to explore how thinkers have conceived of it in the past. We can distinguish among such ideas as the nature of consumption, thoughts about it, attitudes toward it, and perhaps theories about it. One way to come at it is to focus on the consumption of food, as it is clear that the topic of the consumption of food is a primary issue in the study of marketing and of consumer behavior.

Consuming as Cooking and Eating

I like to go back and see what the literature and artifacts of early days tell us about what people consumed and how it was perceived. Scholars may not have studied it specifically as they do today, but they inevitably thought about it from whatever might be the perspective of their role at the time. With that in mind, I asked what we know about the eating and drinking of the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, which is quite a bit. In Egypt, a lot of data comes from paintings of banquet scenes, from the contents of tombs, and writing on stelae and papyrus. There were strong influences from both Asia and Africa and a quite varied diet was available in meat, vegetables, and fruit, with the use of barley to make beer. Although not “scientific studies,” the early literature gives us significant reports of what was consumed, its symbolic meaning, and its important relationships to the culture of the community. For example, one story from over 3000 years ago in The Literature of Ancient Egypt (Simpson 1973), tells us that the king, presumably in sympathy and to comfort, rewarded a priest lector, husband of an adulterous wife, “a large cake, a jug of beer, a joint of meat [ox], and one cone of incense.” For a summary of ideas about food in ancient times, I refer the reader to an excellent, relevant website: www.cooksinfo.com/food-in-ancient-greece. There, and elsewhere, in the original writings, we can learn what Homer and Aristotle thought, and that Archestratus was a gastronome who wrote poems about food (as in the current vein of the Consumer Culture Theory poets) that were controversial and said to corrupt the reader with ideas about luxury rather than a more virtuous austerity. Plato thought that consuming the arts was so strong in shaping character that they had to be severely controlled in his ideal Republic.

The Greeks distinguished their civilized ways from those of barbarians whose use of butter, for instance, was frowned upon, and considered the Persians self-indulgent. The relation of food and alcohol to their potential for carousing is well documented: Dionysus was the god of orgies and drunkenness. As an aside: I have a special affection for Dionysus. His name was sanctified as St. Dion to make Christianity more palatable to Greek pagans. St. Dion morphed into the French St. Denis (pronounced Sahndahny), which crossed the English Channel to become Sidney. I relate this to change the perception of my brand.

The Satyrican of Petronius (1st century A.D.) includes a fabulous celebration of the bacchanalian approach to eating at elite Roman banquets, and reflects the consumption of wealth, indolence, hedonism, and vulgarity. Jumping the centuries, that brings to mind the vision of Henry VIII pork-gorging himself on a large roasted leg, portrayed by Charles Laughton in the 1933 film of The Private Life of Henry VIII. The sheer pleasurable greedy aspect of eating may be a neglected topic in recent studies perhaps because of our concern with obesity and an ambivalence about criticizing heavier people. Historically, among thin poor people a stout wife was prized as a sign of a man’s success; and the obese King Farouk of Egypt was rewarded with his weight in gold on his birthday. In the 1920s, passersby were said to admire (envy?) a millionaire, the large Diamond Jim Brady and voluptuous actress Lillian Russell stuffing themselves conspicuously in the windows of Delmonico’s restaurant, also demonstrating a link between wealth and gluttony.

The literature of the Middle Ages is also highly informative. For example, this website, www.lordsandladies.org/middle-ages-food.htm, describes the cultural diffusion of more than food due to the travels of Crusaders: “The elegance of the Far East, with its silks, tapestries, precious stones, perfumes, spices, pearls, and ivory, was so enchanting that an enthusiastic crusader called it ‘the vestibule of Paradise’.” Travel certainly broadened the mind of the Crusaders, who developed a new and unprecedented interest in beautiful objects and elegant manners. The website notes that:

the preparation of Middle Ages food was of special interest to the women of the era, many of whom accompanied men on the Crusades. The preparation and content of Middle Ages food underwent a sea change – into something rich and strange.

(www.lordsandladies.org/middle-ages-food.htm)

A wonderful contribution comes from Stephen Mennell (1985). All Manners of Food presents eating and taste in England and France from the Middle Ages onward. It is a richly detailed treatise, informative and stimulating in its variety and breadth of topics. The traditional perception of the superiority of French cuisine is exemplified by the work of Brilliat-Savarin (1825), The Physiology of Taste. It is probably the most famous historic work by a gastronome, with gastronomy defined as “the art and science of delicate eating.” As Mennell notes, although designed for the elite, gastronomic writing has served to democratize these ideas.

More recent cookbook writing by the lively Julia Childs and the thoughtful, sensitive essays by M.F.K. Fisher (The Art of Eating 1954) have spread the word about the way food and its preparation are to be experienced and appreciated and have affected the contemporary interest in chefs, cookery, and restaurant attendance. Fisher writes about “Cultural issues, differences between social classes and eating customs, attitudes toward diet, etc.” Her thoughts are echoed by the impressive volume, Larousse Gastronomique, which says,

Dining partners, regardless of gender, social standing, or the years they’ve lived, should be chosen for their ability to eat – and drink! – with the right mixture of abandon and restraint. They should enjoy food, and look upon its preparation and its degustation as one of the human arts.

Its advertisement says that “it presents the history of foods, eating, and restaurants; cooking terms; techniques from elementary to advanced; a review of basic ingredients with advice on recognizing, buying, storing, and using them; biographies of important culinary figures.”

Also significant to this history of the promotion of good eating, is the famed chef Escoffier whose consumers included kings and presidents at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. I visited his museum in Villeneuve-Loubet, France, collected menus, and used his Sauce Diable when making devilled eggs. I was irked when the Nabisco Company evinced some mystique marketing strategy when it acquired Sauce Diable and Sauce Robert and then killed them both.

Consuming by Wearing Clothes

The history of clothing may be similarly examined to show how consumer behavior has become known to us. While food is necessary to sustain all vital life among animals, clothing is almost totally customarily consumed by human beings, with various degrees of coverage ranging from some naked groups to women covered totally by a burqa. There is a lot of history about clothing behavior, including theories that place its origins with estimates from 170,000 to 540,000 years ago. Compared to the study of food consumption, CB scholars seem less given to analyzing behavior with clothing despite Michael Solomon’s innovative doctoral dissertation on the phenomenon of “dress for success.” However, the International Textile and Apparel Association publishes its own journals that focus on (among other topics) how consumers use clothing symbolism to regulate their lives and self-concepts. Also, an interesting background volume may be found on the internet at www.amazon.com/Psychology-Fashion-Advances-Retailing. Another exception is the work by one of my former doctoral students in his e-volume on The Luxury Strategy (Kapferer and Bastien 2009). As a comprehensive analysis for marketers, it touches on diverse realms of luxury consumption, including transportation, which seems another area neglected by CB scholars.

A concern with fashion is of course a concern with the effects of the passage of time and changing circumstances. The consumption of both food and clothing shows the basic influences of the local environments, the climate, and the substances available to feed and cover the body: that is, what is essential and what is possible. But there are always choices to be made, and implications, ramifications, and complications naturally arise. Over time changes in consumption are created by innumerable variables of age, gender, social status, laws, religious belief, aesthetics, and the cultural effects of these, such as technology, education, war, and so on. The same is true of shelter, with the many architectural variations from stone cliff-dwellings of Pueblo Indians (Benedict 1934) to so-called McMansions of the suburbs (Craven 2016). Curiously, again, the study of shelter appears rarely in journals of consumer behavior, despite the widespread attention given it by other media that illustrates its importance to consumers. Still, a valuable background resource is available on the web at Amazon.com that concerns the psychology and sociology of home decoration.

Studying Consumer Behavior, the Grand Topic

An influential treatise such as Max Weber’s (1905) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism explores relationships between economics and spirituality and while it does not speak about the minutiae of consumption in everyday life, the principles and grand guides radiate into desirable and undesirable choices of behavior, as most religions bring along ideas about what foods should be eaten, what clothes should be worn, and strictures about whatever is forbidden.

All these issues result in how people think about their conformity to custom and their presentation of themselves as individuals, thus radiating into grooming, cosmetics, and the endless ways in which they develop their daily consumption. I say all this mainly to set the stage for the more personal view that the editor asked of me. It is a way of saying what a grand topic I consider the subject of consumer behavior to be. It becomes an excuse to study whatever comes to mind, as I have done with the subjects of the arts, death, the telling of lies, and the enjoyment of poetry, as well as the conventions of eating and drinking (Levy 1963, 1996). I will not go into the same detail I have given in several articles and a couple of autobiographical books (One Man in His Time 2014b, A Marketing Educator’s Career 2015b), and will focus mainly on the way consumer behavior has been studied and is being studied, by me and by others.

There is probably no specific point at which the study of consumer behavior began, since observing it has obviously gone on since it started, and I will not belabor the point by citing any more of the early observers throughout history. However, in more recent modern times there have been thoughtful scholars who studied and reflected on consumption in various ways, whether or not as “scientific fathers.” Before coming to the 20th century, a most remarkable work should be recognized. That is The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen (1899). It is defined as a study in economics, a wonderful exploration of a segment of society described as nonproductive and devoted to “conspicuous consumption.” As often happens with original work, it was severely criticized. “Such books as this bring sociology into disrepute among careful and scientific thinkers” and the references to economics are “ill-considered and vicious” (quoted from the Yale Review on the 1945 book jacket). Veblen’s work has outlived that of his critics, a fact that gives me comfort when my work is disparaged or misunderstood by reviewers.

A study that might be regarded as a follow-up on Veblen is Leisure in America by Max Kaplan (1960) where he says Veblen’s work is “famous and important,” and discusses the concept of leisure in a highly ramified way, and is not confined to the upper class. It is an excellent example of how sociologists have studied consumer behavior although Kaplan tends not to refer to it that way. Kaplan also finds scholarly criticism. The anthropologist, W. Lloyd Warner, was one of my professors, mentors, and a colleague at Social Research, Inc. (SRI). He is roundly denounced for his work on social stratification: Pfautz and Duncan (1950) call it irrelevant, technically deficient, weak, inadequate, theoretically uninformed, and ideologically suspect. Despite those “ill-considered and vicious” comments, Warner’s work was useful to us at SRI, helping in the study of consumer behavior among social class groups. We used Warner’s Index of Status Characteristics to measure the social positions of all our respondents, thus being able to show important similarities and differences in their consumption patterns. We wrote about them in several publications: Living with Television (Glick and Levy 1962), Workingman’s Wife (Rainwater, Coleman, and Handel 1962), And the Poor Get Children (Rainwater 1963), “Social Class and Consumer Behavior” (Levy 1966).

Another notable anthropological contribution is the work of Audrey Richards (1932) who studied consumption among the Bantu people of Africa during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Her great classic report, Hunger and Work in a Savage Community was considered ground-breaking work in anthropology. In homage, I wrote “Hunger and Work in a Civilized Tribe, The Anthropology of Market Transactions.” (Levy 1978). A similar modern full-scale work is Consumer Passions: The Anthropology of Eating, by Farb and Armelagos (1980). And Ruth Benedict’s Patters of Culture (1934) should be a basic source for students of Consumer Culture Theory. Along this line of studying society in the context of the time is the writing of Richard Tawney (1921). He discussed the re...