I have spent some time on Woodward (2011) as the language is different from the papers that I would usually read in the consumer psychology area. Why include it anyway? The origins are in psychoanalytic theory which is an area some readers will know about and be interested in. It also falls within the remit of psychology, despite some psychologists avoiding it. And finally it does predict a quest for experiences with objects that originated in the relations the infant had with objects 24 in play and is continued throughout life. Marketers would do well to recognise that what might appear on the surface to be an ordinary, functional object that either works or doesn’t, can for some people be transitioned into something with extraordinary qualities.
Young Children
We have seen in Chapter 8 in the section “That’s Mine! Can Preschoolers Understand Ownership?” that the young infant is capable of claiming ownership of her toy or his clothes in the research of Gelman , Manczak, & Noles (2012) and have also seen how parents assign and attribute cultural capital in the form of names, gifts and endowment whether that is wealth or prestigious cultural norms of behaviour. According to Rossano, Fiedler, and Tomasello (2015), the field of young children’s ideas of possession and ownership has thrived recently. We have also seen from the research of Gelman et al. (2012) that children use the history of the object to determine who owns it and Blake and Harris (2009) found that preschool children demonstrated a sequence of development of understanding ownership such that they were capable of understanding that ownership can be transferred permanently according to social rules by 5 years of age. These achievements are not very surprising given that the ecology that many children occupy and participate in is one where toys, clothes, and bought and consumed things in general occupy an important role in the child’s life. Children gather together and socialise in the preschool or at home when other children come round to play and are entertained at parties. ‘Parties for kids’ are big business with a gift for the birthday child as a necessary entry fee and individual possessions can get confused in the piles of coats and bags. Ownership rules have an important role to play in young children’s lives and it’s important to identify and explore these previously neglected areas. Blake and Harris also argued that a first possessor bias (op. cit., pp. 141–143) was the earliest way of conceiving of ownership that would come into conflict with transfer of ownership. They argued that 2- and 3-year old children tended to regard the child who first possessed an object as the owner—full stop. If a transfer occurred, what type of transfer it was, whether it occurred between children or adults didn’t seem to matter (op. cit., p. 141). Whether this contributes to or ameliorates the pile of coats problem at your child’s party is not known.
We have seen in Chapter 8 in “ The Object concept: How does this relate to children’s understanding of brands?” section that the growing child during infancy can disembed the idea of objects from their accustomed contexts and also think of them as separate from familiar actions like handling, hitting and sucking that young infants perform upon them. The object concept is represented in the mind as an entity that can be desired, avoided and, like mum, can disappear but return. Objects are the stuff of action and separate from it. As the child develops a sense of agency that she can do things, then the objects can be thrown, stacked, exchanged with friends and acquire a vital status in the perceptual and motor world of the infant. This world is soon cognitively represented, and we now know that one of the most important ways is through ownership in all its forms.
Older Children
If we search 25 the literature on the symbolic value of goods and service, we find that children can recognise the communicative function of brands and products to create a coherent image or set of images. As adults we probably have stereotypes about the owners of different types of goods and the consumers of certain products. These are consumption constellations that Solomon and Assael (1987, p. 191) had defined as “a cluster of complementary products, specific brands, and/or consumption activities associated with a social role”. Solomon and Buchanan (1991) utilised a market research database and after some statistical analysis a pattern of interrelated purchases emerged that defined the construct of ‘yuppie ’ which was a popular stereotype at that time. Indeed, equipped with psychographics, demographics and regional data, market researchers can describe the consumption symbolism of people and their accustomed brands. Consumer research into the development of consumption symbolism in children can be traced back to Belk , Bahn, and Mayer (1982). Pairs of photographs of houses and cars were shown to children ranging in age from 5 to 14 years and they were asked to choose the one that was most likely to be owned by a particular type of person such as a doctor or someone with a lot of money or who was the kind of person they’d like to be. The youngest (preschool) group were unable to do this and their choices were at about the chance level. By seven or eight years of age there was a definite agreement on certain kinds of people owning certain kinds of things and this was almost fully developed by adolescence. Children could develop an understanding of the consumption symbolism of products bought by adults . How would they manage with brands that they themselves used? In a subsequent study, Belk , Mayer, and Driscoll (1984) tried to answer this question by presenting photographs of products familiar to children in the United States such as different kinds of jeans and bicycles. Each child had then to check a list of attributes that described the kind of child who owned that product. For example, how wealthy is the child who wears Levis? The child replied on a scale ranging from ‘very poor’ to ‘very rich’. Belk et al. (1984) study confirmed that consumption symbolism developed from nine to 11 years of age and also established that it was stronger in girls than boys and stronger in higher social class children than lower social class children. Personal experience with the product would appear to strengthen the stereotype of the product’s owners and, not surprisingly, owners of the product tended to hold a more favourable stereotype than non-owners. The stereotype became ‘sharper’ as the child grew older in that older children held more extreme or more negative stereotypes of the owner. There was a ‘brand name bias ’. Some of the photographs (e.g. Levi jeans) were identifiable from markings or names as particular brands whereas others, for example, were simply a style of shoe. The mere presence of a brand was enough to cause a more positive stereotype of the owner to emerge. In school-age children it would appear that the presence of brand names is enough to enhance positively the image of the user of that brand.
This research set the agenda and it wasn’t until the rise and rise of theory of mind research that the seminal paper of McAlister and Cornwell (2010) emerged, demonstrating an awareness of the symbolic nature of the brand. Their conclusion was that the results demonstrated that even 3-year olds willingly judge their peers. Being popular or unpopular, fun or boring were attributions made because of the brands they use. Even at such an early age these children will attach great importance to branded products as part of one’s self-image. It would be difficult to overemphasise the importance of this finding. We know from theory of mind research (see Chapter 8, section on “Children’s Understanding of Other People”) that preschoolers are capable of attributing different intentions, thoughts, and beliefs to other children and there is evidence here that the brands the child uses can enhance his or her self-image not just in her own eyes but what she thinks other will think of her. But how can we square this result with the work of Belk about a quarter of a century earlier? There are several reasons why results in consumer psychology change over the years. For example the procedures available to researchers today for recording and analysing data are cheaper and less intrusive than years ago so that data collection and analysis can be done by students in days rather than the expensive and slower methods used last century. Secondly we live in an environment where marketing is ubiquitous world-wide and tastes and fashions are integral to our existence when we compare ourselves to our parents’ and grandparents’ generations. And finally we are more willing
as both producers and consumers of theory to admit into our models implicit or ‘deep’ forms of knowledge and understanding that can be accessed by children under certain conditions. So the continual pushing of the frontiers of the child’s understanding to earlier ages which seems to me to be characteristic of much developmental psychology since the ‘60s and ‘70s is justified.
Recent evidence suggests that the child’s awareness of the symbolic nature of brands emerges early in the child’s life. Watkins , Aitken, Thyne, Robertson , and Borzekowski (2017) in a valuable study of the role of different environmental influences on the child’s understanding of brand symbolism showed that exposure to television and parental communicative style were significant factors influencing this aspect of the child’s understanding of brands. Even at two years of age the children used in this study could “…infer symbolic user attributes and non-product-related associations with brands” (op. cit., p. 907).
We can conclude that at some point in childhood the child will understand that others choose goods and services that involve considering some aspects of their self and that that they are aware that many others do the same thing. There is also a long development trajectory involved from 2 years of age onward with plenty of time for other socialisation agents such as the family’s communicative style with the child and how much media different children consume 26 to influence and determine the understanding of brand symbolism by children as they grow up. 27
Children who are able to recognise that brands have symbolic meaning will soon recognise that brands don’t exist in isolation and that the media is full of stereotypes of different kinds of people who themselves consume and display brands as part of their self-definition , and that they could also participate in this consumption game. Both Douglas and Isherwood (1978) and McCracken (1988) had discussed the role of consumption in stereotyping but it was Davis (2000) in an early paper in this area who specifically related it to Solomon and Buchanan’s (1991) idea of a consumption constellation and demonstrated a strong age-related effect from 5 to 12 years of age with the oldest groups showing they were able to categorise people stereotypically based on their consumption preferences. Chaplin and Lowrey (2010) wanted to explore the full set of relations between brands and the ways children describe people, from the vantage point of the child. How do children view consumers of different brands? The authors locate their investigation firmly as an exploration of stereotypes and the role of objects of consumption in their formation and maintenance. Using several methodologies they found evidence for consumption constellations in children as young as 5 years and obviously 28 did not yet have access to McAlister and Cornwell (2010) and Watkins et al. (2017) had not yet been published. Both McAlister and Cornwell and Watkins et al. claimed that symbolic understanding was present in the preschool period . Chaplin and Lowrey (2010) also mapped the development of consumption constellations across the school grades into adolescence. Until about 10–11 years of age the constellations emerged grew in size, structural complexity, and ease of access. In other words these new found stereotypes were becoming part of the child’s mental repertoire in a predictable way. However as the child enters adolescence something different happens and we shall turn to that now.
Adolescence
Continuing with Chaplin and Lowrey (2010) on consumption constellations , when children enter adolescence their stereotypes become stronger and more rigid. This suggests they have smaller constellations and fewer social dimensions. It seems that they will categorise in a more biased way and the nuances that younger school children provided are missing. The authors explain this by appealing to both Erikson ’s and Piaget’s theories of development at this stage of life. Piaget’s ideas on stage development are appropriate as the adolescent enters a new period of abstract thinking but is still limited by the egocentrism that characterises the early part of a Piagetian period of development. In other words they will see things from their own point of view and have difficulty incorporating the views of others into their thoughts. However one would predict that, later in adolescence their thoughts would become more likely to incorporate contradictory information. Which is what happens with consumption constellations because according to the authors by 15–16 years adolescents’ constellations include more clusters and more elements than those younger adolescents but also are more flexible and less stereotyped.
Adolescence is also a time when the teenager becomes a member of different social groups and often the cost of group membership is high. Elliott and Leonard (2004) interviewed a sample of adolescents from financially poor homes about ‘trainers’ which is used in the UK to refer to sports shoes produced by Nike for example. The price of these shoes can range widely depending on the aspirational status of a particular brand and they found that children with expensive trainers would be seen as rich and young and fit in with their peers. Those kids with cheap trainers however were perceived as poor and in some cases would be rejected by their peers and some children would socialise only with those who wore branded trainers (op. cit., p. 347). In a similar vein Piacentini and Mailer (2004) found that clothes style amongst teenagers in the UK was driven by an emerging adolescent identity and extended into preferences like which bands were cool for their particular group. A sense of self with emerging identities is important for adolescents as they go through the bodily and psychological changes that characterise this stage. As identity and self are important not just for adolescents but also across the lifespan in consumption it’s relevant to pause here and elaborate just what these terms mean.
Self and Identity in Adolescence
The literature on self and identity is large and unwieldy and spans many different area of psychology ranging from precise cognitive assertions to more wordy therapeutic and clinical uses. Consequently I shall create a composite picture of self and identity in adolescence here from a variety of sources. Although ‘self’ and ‘identity’ are often used interchangeably in the literature I shall refer the former as a collection of distinct identities that can overlap over time. Self is what we refer to when trying to answer the question ‘who am I?’ Adams and Marshall (1996) argued that the adolescent faces the paradox of wanting to be a member of a group, a desire to unite, belong and connect with others and also to be an individual, who is unique, different and separate from others. The attempts to resolve this dilemma can drive change and in a sense move the adolescent through and beyond adolescence into young adulthood . Others provide a necessary context in order to construct and play out different identities but eventually the individual needs to pursue his or her own path in life (see Chapter 7 in the section on “Identity and Role Confusion”). It only requires a passing knowledge of the ways of the adolescent or teenager to realise that consumption needs and desires are intimately related to these drivers of same and different, whether consuming clothes, music, social media, or hair and body styling and adornment.
The self has different facets and this is reflected, in my opinion in the search for self, a quest that is universal and conducted in bars, or long walks in the wilderness, as well as in academic conference papers. McConnell (2011) argues that not only do we hold different self-concepts but also that these facets are subject to the same influences in the mind as other constructs. They can be affected by context, which in the language of this book would deal with part of the ecology of the consumption experience as well as being subject to the vagaries of priming and peripheral processing in general. This is a refreshing look at the concept of selfhood as often there is a temptation to see the self as a constant entity within the swirling interactions between mind and environment . It also opened up for me several possible research areas such as the self that consumes online Amazon’s mammoth range of products using online browsing and waits at home in irritation for the doorbell to ring versus the self that wallows in the excitement of the mall or the specialist shop and the purchase in a transaction with a real human being. The solitary information gathering and systematic evaluation of alter
natives sitting in front of screen should encourage the rational decision making side of self and the latter evokes a more social collective emotional aspect of self. But many consumer decisions can be made using smartphones where information at one’s fingertips is shared socially with a partner or family and this can be done instore or having lunch at the mall. It would be difficult to predict under these circumstances what self operates under these circumstances.
Consumer Psychology Page 36