Reflections Consumer Culture Theory (CCT): Twenty Years of Research

1
ReflectionsConsumer Culture Theory (CCT)Twenty
Years of Research

• ERIC J. ARNOULD
• CRAIG J. THOMPSON
• Presented by Pei-chun Chao

2
Agenda

• Definition of CCT (Consumer Culture Theory) ?
• What CCT is not
• Three enduring misconceptions
• What CCT is
• Four thematic domains of research interest

3
CCT (Consumer Culture Theory)
CCT
4
CCT (Consumer Culture Theory)

• A thematic overview of consumer research
  addressing the sociocultural, experiential,
  symbolic, and ideological aspects of consumption
  in the past 20 years in JCR
• CCT focuses on the core theoretical interests and
  questions that define this research tradition and
  signifies the theoretical commonalities and
  linkages within this research tradition
• Consumer culture denotes a social arrangement in
  which the relations between lived culture and
  social resources, and between meaningful ways of
  life and the symbolic and material resources on
  which they depend, are mediated through markets

5
CCT (cont.)

• Example the symbol of beauty

6
CCT (cont.)

• Local cultures are increasingly interpenetrated
  by the forces of globalization.
• Example Estee Lauder New Perfectionist
  CPElizabeth Hurley US vs. Taiwan
• What are the benefits of globalization to
  marketers?
• Globalization
• Slow Down Culture

7
DemythologizingWhat CCT is not

• Contribute too little to theory development.
• The studies are following theoretical questions.
• Generate new constructs and theoretical insights
• Extend existing theoretical formulations

8
DemythologizingWhat CCT is not

• The primary differences are methodological.
• Embrace methodological pluralism (whenever
  quantitative measures and analytic techniques can
  advance the operative theoretical agenda)

9
DemythologizingWhat CCT is not

• The myth of managerial irrelevance
• Subsequent developments have brought consumer
  meanings to the center of managerial concerns,
  and are critical to marketing strategies. (such
  as CRM, lifestyle and multicultural marketing,
  and the proliferation of so-called identity
  brands)

10
IlluminatingWhat CCT is

• The Consumption Cycle

CCT
Acquisition
Consumption Possession
Disposition

• the symbolic, embodied, and experiential aspects
• Ex Gift Giving

• the most widely studied
• Ex HSBC

• consumers negotiation of role identity
  transition
• Ex Change

11
IlluminatingWhat CCT is
12
Ex Facebook Bad Vista Reviews from Apple

• Search for personal distinctiveness and autonomy
  in lifestyle choices
• Share localized cultural capital within group

13
IlluminatingWhat CCT is

• Marketplace Culture
• Consumers are seen as culture producers instead
  of culture bearers.
• From a ceaseless quest for personal
  distinctiveness and autonomy in lifestyle
  choices.
• CCT research seeks to unravel the processes by
  which consumer culture is instantiated in
  particular cultural milieu and the implications
  of this process for people experiencing it.
• In-group social status in these settings is
  achieved through displays of localized cultural
  capital (particular forms of knowledge and skills
  valued in the group) and skill in combining,
  reworking, and innovating the pool of symbolic
  resources that are shared by group members.
• Example youth subculture, blog, forum

14
Ex Gap vs. Banana Republic
Banana Republic
Gap

• Goal-driven
• The aims pursued may often be tacit.
• Sometimes encounter conflicts internal
  contradictions

15
IlluminatingWhat CCT is

• Consumer Identity Projects
• CCT concerns the coconstitutive, coproductive
  ways in which consumers, working with
  marketer-generated materials, forge a coherent if
  diversified and often fragmented sense of self.
• Consumers are conceived of as identity seekers
  and makers.
• Goal-driven, although the aims pursued may often
  be tacit in nature (and vaguely understood) and
  marked by points of conflict, internal
  contradictions, ambivalence, and even pathology.
• The marketers should position certain different
  products so that the consumers can choose to
  dwell in.
• Example Gap vs. Banana Republic

16
Ex Kaisi Oolong Tea

• Directs the course of consumers mental
  attention, experiences, and related practices of
  self-narration.
• Invite consumers to covet certain identity and
  lifestyle ideals

17
IlluminatingWhat CCT is

• Mass-Mediated Marketplace Ideologies and
  Consumers' Interpretive Strategies
• Consumer ideologysystems of meaning that tend to
  channel and reproduce consumers' thoughts and
  actions in such a way as to defend dominate
  interests in society (Hirschman 1993).
• Consumers are conceived of as interpretive agents
  whose meaning-creating activities range from
  those that tacitly embrace the dominant
  representations of consumer identity and
  lifestyle ideals portrayed in advertising and
  mass media to those that consciously deviate from
  these ideological instructions.
• The systematical predisposing directs the course
  of consumers mental attention, experiences, and
  related practices of self-narration and even
  invite consumers to covet certain identity and
  lifestyle ideals.
• Example Apple Kaisi Oolong Tea

18
Ex A Typical Asian Woman

• Choices and behaviors are shaped by social class
  hierarchies, gender, ethnicity, and families,
  households, and other formal groups

19
IlluminatingWhat CCT is

• The Sociohistoric Patterning of Consumption
• Consumers are conceived of as enactors of social
  roles and positions.
• Consumer culture theorists investigate the
  processes by which consumption choices and
  behaviors are shaped by social class hierarchies,
  gender, ethnicity, and families, households, and
  other formal groups.
• Example the growing women power in Taiwan

20
More and more women are now employed.And their
salary has double digit increase.
Employment
Avg. Monthly Salary (NT)
Female
Male
4.3
11.2
Source National Statistics, The Executive
Yuan, Taiwan compiled by TNS Taiwan
21
Marketers need to cope with the changing role of
women.

• Example Nike Women, Choya Plum Wine

22
Multiple Realities

• Consumers use consumption to experience realities
  that differ dramatically from the quotidian.

Disneyland
Halloween Costume
23
Summary

• Consumption is a historically shaped mode of
  sociocultural practice that emerges within the
  structures and ideological imperatives of dynamic
  marketplaces.
• CCT research is fundamentally concerned with the
  cultural meanings, sociohistoric influences, and
  social dynamics that shape consumer experiences
  and identities in the myriad messy contexts of
  everyday life.
• Consumer culture theory research shows that many
  consumers' lives are constructed around multiple
  realities and that they use consumption to
  experience realities that differ dramatically
  from the quotidian.
• Example Disneyland, Halloween

24
New Frontiers for CCT

• Broader analyses of the historical and
  institutional forces that have shaped the
  marketplace and the consumer as a social category
• The temporality of consumption experiences, a
  topic instigated through interest in nostalgia
  and reinvigorated under the rubric of retroscapes
  and retrobranding.
• The globalization of consumer culture and its
  manifestations in less developed countries and
  those characterized by transitional economies.

25
Thank you!!!