Brian M. Young
Consumer Psychology
A Life Span Developmental Approach
Brian M. YoungThe Business School, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-90910-3e-ISBN 978-3-319-90911-0
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90911-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018943852
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
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This book is dedicated to Laura and Sadie
Preface
For many years now I have been interested in the relationship between children and marketing. I have taught it at the University of Exeter as an optional subject to both psychology students and business school students over a period of almost 20 years. I edit a journal called Young Consumers that publishes academic papers and the occasional practitioner paper in the area and I have written and contributed to books on the subject. My own background is in psychology and my first experience of research, many years ago was as a research assistant on a project at the University of Edinburgh looking at language and thinking in preschool children. My Ph.D. from the University of Hong Kong was influenced a lot by cross-cultural research into language and thinking. When I returned to England to a lectureship in a Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Salford I read a lot about media analysis and in particular the analysis of advertising and published my first single authored book on Television Advertising and Children . When I came to the Psychology Department in the University of Exeter I got involved in a research group involved in economic psychology and we wrote a book collectively that was published as The Economic Psychology of Everyday Life which not only looked at what people thought, felt and did economically in their daily lives but also took an overview that spanned life from childhood to old age. I wrote some of the parts on childhood.
So there were a lot of unfinished threads left hanging there and the temptation was to clip them and start something new. I have always been restless with work and my self-description could be described as eclectic on a good day and dilettante on a bad one. Obviously I haven’t yielded to temptation and I hope the book will fill a gap in consumer psychology and be more of a tapestry than a knot. There are several features that hopefully will enable you to go beyond this brief preface and dip into it. When I taught my main consumer psychology courses to psychology students it was relatively easy to incorporate something on children and consumption because they would be familiar with the trajectories of human development and saw consumer psychology in children as a special area different perhaps from children in school or in relationships for example. It was seen by them as a special area of developmental psychology. Teaching the subject to Business School students however was different. Students there saw children and consumption as part of consumer research, consumer behaviour or even consumer psychology and as a problematic area where ethical considerations dominated and one is never sure what sort of skills and abilities the child consumer has when he or she is acquiring stuff or trying to get others to do it. Of course ethics are relevant as are health and well-being concerns. However a life-span approach can integrate childhood as one part of our lives as we progress through from birth to old age. So one of the reasons for doing a book like this was to integrate my own interests in children and marketing into the mainstream of consumer psychology.
Is this a book for psychologists or consumer researchers? The language used and the evidence base I consulted is in the psychology tradition so I have spent some time at the beginning making sure I’ve covered several key issues in psychology such as the nature of perception and memory. Some of the content and the way I’ve approached topics has been tuned, tried and tested in my classes to students at Exeter, first in the Psychology Department and now in the Business School. It’s a good read for both kinds of student and the content is appropriate for final year students or those at the Masters level.
One final point I’d like to make. When I read books in new areas where the content is not elementary and is evidence-based, I’m continuously tripping over names and dates. These are often left, unopened at the end of sentences and paragraphs and scattered like so much confetti in order to demonstrate the academic credibility of the subject matter. Well you’ll get them here but most of them are opened, examined and discussed and the content integrates and also drives the story I’m telling. They’re also bang up-to-date, at least at the time of writing. It’s a good story and I hope you enjoy it.
This book has been many months in the making and I would like to thank the Business School at the University of Exeter for providing me with an Honorary Fellowship which meant a desk and access to one of the most impressive range of online journals, search engines and journals that I’ve ever used, and all available at the click of a mouse. But more importantly meeting a bunch of colleagues who were some of the nicest and most interesting people I’ve ever met. Thanks guys!
Brian M. Young
Exeter, UK
April 2018
Contents
1 Definitions and Visions of Consumption
2 Concepts and Themes
3 How Consumers’ Minds Work: An Introduction to the Basics
4 How We Process Information: A Look at Embodied Cognition and Priming
5 One Mind or Two? An Introduction to Dual Process Theories
6 Development Through the Lifespan: Is It a Viable Approach?
7 Erikson’s Stages of Life: Can We Bridge the Gap?
8 Childhood and Younger Children: The Gaze from Developmental Psychology
9 The Older Child: Becoming a Serious Consumer
10 Children, Ownership and Possessions: The Origins
11 Ownership and Possessions: The Adult Perspective and into the Future
12 And Now the End Is Near…
Index
© The Author(s) 2018
Brian M. YoungConsumer Psychologyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90911-0_1
1. Definitions and Visions of Consumption
Brian M. Young1
(1)The Business School, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK
Brian M. Young
Email: [email protected]
Definition of Consumption
‘Consumption ’ and associated terms like ‘co
nsumer ’ and ‘consumerism ’ are prevalent in both academic literature and more popular discourse and you will find these terms in the pages of newspapers, magazines and their electronic versions without too much difficulty. My original intention was to start with a crisp definition of consumption together with a critical examination of the limitations and possible extensions of this definition and then ‘get on with it’ as I tend to meander and wander through areas in my teaching, or so my students tell me. However I was attracted to a book (Ekström & Brembeck, 2004) as I know one of the authors well and respect her writing. It has the tempting title Elusive consumption and a quick browse suggested I should dip into it as the chapter authors had excellent provenance and seemed to enjoy what they were writing about. The results were both rewarding and depressing. Certainly I learnt a lot and the main lesson that consumption was indeed difficult to pin down with a definition and some clear practices and examples of consumption in different contexts. We need other disciplines to contribute to fleshing out consumption as it can be located and legitimately discussed in many other contexts ranging from strict experimental psychology to the relatively recent approach of consumer culture theory (CCT) (Arnould & Thompson, 2005). That’s why I thought it was important for me at the outset in the Preface, to outline where I’m coming from and why I became interested and involved in writing this book.
But I do think we need to define what consumption is and the Oxford English Dictionary has several definitions. The most relevant one for our purposes would be the economic one: “The purchase and use of goods, services, materials, or energy” (Consumption, n.d.) which is often used in opposition to ‘production ’. It’s important to note the pivotal role that buying has in consumption but it’s even more important to think of possible counterexamples to this. What about public goods , available to all? Is this an example of consumption that is freed from purchase? Public goods are usually classified on two criteria and Samuelson (1954) defined them as those anyone could access (which are called non-excludable) and everyone could consume (called non-rival). From my vantage point, living in the English countryside where it rains a lot and the wind blows in from the Atlantic then air and water would appear to fit the bill as two major public goods. Air is fresh. Water however needs to be managed and if you are a householder then water bills need to be settled. But these niggling doubts about air and water as public goods par excellence fade into insignificance when the problems of living and breathing in Beijing 1 or suffering a drought in Southern Africa are considered. The existence of public goods seems to be a myth.
The tragedy of the commons (Hardin, 1968) is an eloquent way of describing the inevitable loss that a group of consumers suffer when allowed unrestricted use of a common resource. The example usually used is based on the meaning of commons as land providing common grazing rights for an agrarian village or crofting community. This is used as an illustrative context for the expression. The inevitable result is that self-interested individuals will graze their animals ad libitum and, as the interests of the group are commonized or spread over a number of individuals then each individual gain will be less than that individual’s part-share in the loss incurred by overgrazing the common land. Result? Everyone suffers.
Consumption is often used as complementary to production as the two words go together when considering the role of goods and services in society. Production has a variety of meanings and the one that is most relevant here is production being “the action or process of making goods from components or raw materials; the manufacture of goods for sale and consumption” (Production, n.d.). Now these two roles complement each other in the sense that there is a need or want for a good or service then there should be some arrangement to provide it. Hopefully what you are consuming right now was originally the product of my imagination and labour and after some intermediary stages which we can call ‘process’ ends up in consumption whether as a book or an electronic collection of 1s and 0s. ‘Process’ however is less clear and the stages are often ill-defined. For example digital books and periodicals can be re-arranged and re-produced with little or no process to make a plagiarised product and other collections of 1s and 0s will then be marshalled to detect it and punish the offender. The drift into a digitalised environment makes the already problematic distinction between production and consumption less clear. To what extent is a pair of jeans that are manufactured and mass produced in Cambodia consumed by a young woman in England who then decides to slash them and wear them as personalised fashion garments? Should that be seen as production of a personalised item from a commodity that is available in stores or as consumption by one consumer ? Obviously the distance between production and consumption is a concept that is based on moveable end points, apart from the difficulty of interpreting what ‘distance’ could mean. But that does not mean that we can’t try to operationalise this idea and recent developments in what used to be called ‘supply chains’ have adopted a more sophisticated global view by using the idea of commodity chains (Burr, 2015). Although this book is not the place to argue about the theory and practice of analysing the global economy into a network of economic value exchanges, the visual metaphor of a market place populated with international goods and services where each one has a history of links and nodes will enable the reader to appreciate the complexity of the system before we analyse the consumption process in more detail. Also the emphasis on process, where stuff you consume has a history of coming from somewhere and will often end up going somewhere else is a continual theme in the book. The term ‘prosumption ’ is used by some theorists (Boesel & Jurgenson, 2015) to describe the simultaneous acts when prosumers consume what they produce or produce what they consume, or both together. They cite various examples such as user-generated web content (so-called Web 2.0) and cite concrete examples (home brewing) to more abstract ones (workers consuming their own identities while at work). We shall return to this blend of consumption and production in the section “Toward a Theory of Recycling”.
A Vision of Consumption
So how do we conceptualise consumption in a way that is relevant for psychological approaches to consumption? Let’s start with an individual. Psychology has been thought of as the study of individual behaviour within a cultural and social context, so that seems appropriate. This person is carrying a large bag which is black so we don’t know what’s inside it. We don’t know the person’s gender or whether that attribution is relevant in that particular cultural context, or indeed anything about him or her including where s(he) is apart from somewhere on planet Earth. What do we need to know in order to construct a consumer psychology of this person? Imagine what could be happening. She wants to get rid of some stuff she has accumulated and no longer needs and is on the way to a recycling centre. He is going shopping and this is his bag to carry merchandise and he is looking for a store that’s open. Or she is in the mall and the bag is branded and very collectable and she is about to pay a lot of money for it. All of these activities and many more are consumption related behaviours and we can freeze and locate our hypothetical black bag guy (let’s use the name Guy 2 ) in various dimensions. Assuming we are time travellers we can introduce an historical dimension. It’s 1950 in London, England and we see Guy in a long queue outside a butcher’s shop that might just be selling meat. She is wondering if she has enough ration coupons to buy a few ounces (we can predict pretty confidently the gender of Guy in 1950 and that gender is certainly relevant at that time and in that place). Fast forward 65 years or so and the range of products, the gender of the shopper, the availability of goods, and so on has transformed shopping. But we are not going to cover the history of consumption here, just acknowledging it as our first dimension as it is discussed extensively in other sources (see for example; Trentmann , 2012).
Guy lives somewhere on our planet and this provides me with an opportunity to mention cross-cultural issues, both within a culture and between cultures. There are two styles of research and enquiry that are used in mak
ing comparisons between different groups of people. One, known as the etic way, attempts to establish certain universal ways of analysing culture and using these generalisations as a tool to compare and contrast. The other (sometimes called the emic approach) argues that a valid understanding about a culture can only emerge when researchers get to know the rules and regularities of a culture by immersing themselves as a participant and observer for a prolonged period of time. The former way of observing and analysing cultures tends to be used by experimental psychologists while the latter is more the province of social anthropology. They are not completely mutually exclusive however and each way has its strengths and weaknesses. Within a culture there exist differences in for example socialisation styles and family structures and these provide opportunities to identify patterns of difference and similarity. Culture is a continuum and does not obey the boundaries imposed by nation states or other polities.
There is no way of knowing what Guy is up to and this is deliberate as s(he) is meant to represent all of us and to emphasise that consumption is a process rather than a single event. Even if we did only focus on one such event and imagined a chair being drawn up and a fork spearing food on a plate, that piece of fish being eaten and consumed trails a history of commodity chains with it which it partly shares with the chips now defrosted and ready to eat as they have shared the same shelves and truck side by side in their box. We plug into goods and services with such histories in our vast market places and this has happened in the past and is happening right now across the world in different ways.
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