TÜKETİCİ DAVRANIŞLARI - Deneme Sınavı - 8

Culture is learnt 

Culture is learned. Culture is not a system of values that is innate or transmitted by genetically. One learns culture through his/her family and environment after he/she was born. Cultural elements are gradually passed down from one generation to another by learning. From a marketing  viewpoint, it is seen that some advertisements introduce “a model to be copied” by using the method of indirect learning.

Culture meets a need: Culture meets a need. Culture exists to meet the needs of society’s members. It offers order, direction, and guidance in all phases of human problem solving by providing ‘tried-and-true’ methods of satisfying physiological, personal, and social needs

Acculturation: When discussing the acquisition of culture, anthropologists usually distinguish between the learning of one’s own or native culture and the learning of some ‘new’ (other) culture. The learning of one’s own culture is known as enculturation while the learning of a new or foreign culture is called acculturation.

Ideology:

Norm: 

A limitation to behavior defined by culture is named as a norm. For example taking shoes off when entering homes, offering drinks to guest, and starting serving from the oldest in the room. If the individual does not comply with the norms of society, the social groups do not approve his/her behavior and thus, he/she is excluded. Conformity to norms is sometimes rewarded (İslamoğlu and Altunışık, 2017, p.179). Norms are the standards accepted by a society and its individuals are expected to comply with them. They are the rules that define appropriate and inappropriate behavior (Bradley, 2002, p.94). Norms provide guidelines that regulate social life.

Content analysis

Content analysis focuses on the content of verbal, written, and visual communications,such as the copy and art composition of an advertisement (Schiffman, Hansen and Kanuk, 2012, p. 349).

Consumer fieldwork

The prominent characteristics of field observation are as follows (Schiffman, Hansen and Kanuk, 2012, p.350):

Family

Culture is the total of values and norms shared by the society’s members. It is expected the members of a society to comply with and behave according to the socially accepted cultural norms and values.  In addition to the family, two other institutions share much of the responsibility for the transfer of selected aspects of culture: educational institutions and houses of worship. In some countries, educational institutions are specifically responsible for imparting basic learning skills, history, patriotism, citizenship, and the technical training needed to prepare people for significant roles within society. Religious institutions provide and maintain religious consciousness, spiritual guidance, and moral training. Although the young receive much of their consumer training within their family setting, the educational and religious systems reinforce this training by teaching economic and ethical concepts

McDonaldization

Global consumption culture, as a concept on which all the countries today try to dwell and which is sometimes described ironically as “McDonaldization” and “Coca-Colonization”, refers to the acceptance of the same patterns, trends, and actions of consumption all over the world (Odabaşı, 2006).

Subcultures 

The culture in a country or a market can vary in terms of different values, habits, customs, and behaviors. There is no proper and thoroughly homogeneous culture in hardly any market. The reason is that a society consists of people of different ethnicities and religions and that different geographic structures create different cultures. The diversity of subcultures in a society is a richness (Koç, 2017). It is possible to say that the culture of a country or society consists of the two major sets of elements (Schiffman, Hansen and Kanuk, 2012, p.352):

The following presents some definitions of attitudes:

• Attitude is our positive (liking), negative (disliking) or indifferent (neutral, neutrality, aloofness) evaluation of an object, a person or people (including ourselves), a topic or an idea, and our tendency to act in a certain way based on these evaluations (Koç, 2019).

• Attitude is defined as the positive or negative evaluations felt by the individual toward objects, concepts, ideas or symbols (Loudon & Bitta, 1993).

• Attitude is “the tendency to evaluate a symbol, object or event in a negative or positive way” (Katz, 1960).

The purpose of studies on attitude is to predict and to explain behavior of individuals (Eiser, 1997).

Consumers’ attitudes to object of attitudes i.e. products, brands, stores, restaurants etc.can be complex. They vary according to (Blythe, 2001:54):

• valence – whether the attitude is positive, negative or neutral;

• extremity – the strength and the power of the attitude;

• resistance – the degree to which the attitude can be changed by outside influences;

• persistence – the degree to which the attitude erodes over time; and

• confidence – the level at which the consumer believes the attitude is correct.

There are three elements of an attitude: cognitive, emotional and behavioral. The cognitive element refers to the knowledge and beliefs of the consumer about an object or event. The emotional element characterizes feelings about objects. The behavioral element represents goals and the desire to act towards the goal. For more information, refer to Figure 5.1 in the course book.

Consumers approach a product purchase decision as a problem-solving process. In the first level of hierarchy, the consumer forms his beliefs about a product or a brand by accumulating knowledge (beliefs) regarding relevant attributes of the product/brand. Later, the consumer evaluates his beliefs and forms a feeling about the product (affect). For more information please refer to Figure 5.2 in the course book.

After purchasing a product or service, consumers adopt different attitudes based on their liking or disliking. Utilitarian function is related to the basic principles of reward or punishment (Solomon et al., 2006a). For example, a person’s attitude towards a cleaning agent can be shaped by either removing dirt easily (maximizing reward) or preventing consumers from spending too much time to remove dirt (minimizing punishment) (Gregory, et al., 2002). If the object a consumer wants to have in order to meet a specific need serves his/her purpose, the attitude developed towards it will also be positive (İnceoğlu, 2011). People strive to maximize rewards in their external environment and reduce punishments to the lowest level (Katz, 1960). In this example, consumers are maximizing their reward by being able to drive further, and minimizing their punishments through reduced fuel consumption and running costs.

Encouraging attitude formation based on imagined experience: Marketers can communicate information through ads featuring vivid language, detailed pictures, or instructions to encourage consumers to imagine the experience. Doing this may produce positive brand attitudes as long as consumers are good at imagining things and as long as they focus on positive aspects rather than potentially negative aspects.

Scarcity: The more difficult it is to obtain a product or brand, the more attractive it becomes as its quantity decreases. Therefore, it can be very useful to emphasize scarcity in messages to create an attitude. In particular, the use of restriction in campaigns can be given as an example.

Identification: A process of identification occurs when attitudes are formed in order for the consumer to be similar to another person or group. Advertising that depicts the social consequences of choosing some products over others is relying on the tendency of consumers to imitate the behaviour of desirable models.

According to the “Balance Theory”, individuals form a system which they call “triad” and they determine their attitude according to the relationship among triads. Each triad includes 1. a person and his/her perceptions, 2. an attitude object, and 3. “the other” (a person or an object). People can shape their attitudes clearly if the triad is in harmony, and they feel tension if there is a discrepancy between these three things. This theory assumes that balanced states are stable while imbalanced states are unstable. When an unstable situation arises, the psychological tension encourages a person to restore balance cognitively by changing the relationships. Therefore, a person’s attitude towards an object depends on his attitude towards a source that is linked to the object.

Validity is an important issue in attitude scales. Validity expresses the precision and accuracy of scientific findings (Büyüköztürk et al., 2010; McMillan & Schumaher, 2010). One of the most common problems that decrease validity is social desirability. Responses to items in an attitude scale towards social desirability are responses that are inconsistent with the individual’s real feelings.