WEEK 23

CULTURE

Culture is the 'prism' through which people view products and try to make sense of their own and other peoples consumer behaviour. Culture is a concept crucial to the understanding of consumer behaviourCulture is a mix of shared meanings, rituals, norms and traditions amoung a organisation or society.It is something that defines the human community, their individuals, the social organizations as well as the economic and political systems.

Culture is built up on the following:

-Peoples perceptions of what is right or wrong

-Family values

-Societies values and attitudes

-community learning

-communal or collective memory

Ralph Linton (1945): 'A culture is the configuration of learned behaviour and results of behaviour whose component elements are shared and transmitted by members of a particular society'.

Culture includes both abstract ideas such as values and ethics and the material objects and services like, cars, clothing, food, art and sports that are produced or valued by a group of people. Even though individual consumers and groups of consumers are part of culture, culture is the overall system of other systems organized.

Up until today researchers treated culture as a sort of variable that would explain the differences they saw as a central dimension in society which is economic behaviour. Today the industrial society has become very aware that the principles of economy are themselves a kind of culture. Culture is represented as the skin of an onion just like it is represented in the diagram below.

According to wikipedia culture is a term that has different meanings. However the word 'culture' is most commonly used in three basic senses: - Taste in the fine arts and humanities also known as high culture. - A mix pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behaviour that depends upon the capacity for symbolic thought and social learning. - The set of shared attitudes, values, goals and practices that characterizes and institution, organization or group. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture

The effects of culture on consumer behaviour are so powerful and people are surrounded by many practices from many significant behaviours like pressing the start button on our walkman to larger behaviours like flying to a different country for a honeymoon. The important thing is that these practices have meaning to us.

Culture is made up of three essential components:
(1) Beliefs- Mental and verbal processes that reflect our knowledge and assessment of products and services.

(2) Values- Indicators consumers use as guides for what is appropriate behaviour, they tend to be relatively enduring and stable.

(3) Custom- overt modes of behaviour, that constitute culturally approved or acceptable ways of behaving in specific situations.
A consumers culture determines the overall priorities he or she attatches to different activities or products. It also determines the success or failure of specific products services. A products that has benefits for the ones that are desired by members of a culture have a better chance of being accepted in the market place.

The relationship between culture and consumer behaviour is a two way street. On one hand products and services with benefits to culture groups have a better chance of being accepted by the consumers. On the other hand The new products designed successfully by a culture at any point provides a window on the dominant cultural ideas of that period.

Aspects of culture

A cultural system can be said to consist of three functional areas:
-Ecology: This area is shaped by the technology used to obtain the distribute resources.

- Social structure: This area includes the domestic and political groups that are dominant within the culture.

- Ideology: This area revolves around the belief that members of a society possess a common Worldview. They share ideas about principles of order and fairness.

Rules for behaviour

Values are very general principles for judging between good and bad goals. They form the core principles of every culture (norm). Crescive norms include the following:

- A custom is a norm handed down by the past that controls basic behaviour like a division of labour in a household.

-Mores are customs with a strong moral overtone. Mores often involve a taboo or forbidden behaviour such as cannibalism.

-Conventions are norms regarding the conduct of everyday life. These rules deal with the subleties of consumer behaviour, including the 'correct' way to furnish ones house, wear ones clothes, host dinner parties and so on.