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Chap 13: Subcultures - Coggle Diagram
Chap 13: Subcultures
13-3 Marketers increasingly use religious and spiritual themes to talk to consumers.
Organized religion and consumption
Marketers have not studied organized religion extensively, possibly because many view it as a taboo subject.
One research director noted: “Religion, along with sex and politics, is one of the three taboo topics that we’re never supposed to talk about.”
Religious sensibilities vary around the world, and big trouble can result if marketers violate taboo subjects in other cultures.
Despite the occasional blunder, it’s clear that religious dietary or dress requirements do create demand for certain products.
Born again consumers
Religion is big business.
The strength of the evangelical movement has caught the attention of many marketers who want to reach these consumers.
Islamic marketing
Muslims will be more than one-quarter of the Earth’s population by 2030, and during that same time period analysts expect the number of U.S. That’s a consumer market to take seriously.
Today, some companies listen more closely to the needs of this religious subculture.
Halal as a descriptor is being used for more and more commodities, services, and activities, including milk, water, nonprescription medicine, holidays, washing powder, tissues, cosmetics, Web sites, and music.
Many major companies are taking steps to reassure consumers that all of their products—not just food—are halal by having them officially certified.
13-6 Teens are an important age segment for marketers.
Gen Z
Gen Z describes kids who were born in the late 1990s to early 2000s, so they will start entering college in just a few years.
Marketers are just starting to figure out what this new group of young consumers will look like.
Having grown up during the Great Recession, they are not as likely to believe in an idealized, carefree world.
They tend to be independent and gravitate to stores like Free People rather than Abercrombie & Fitch.
They learn about new styles from around the globe via social media, so they are equally at home watching The Hunger Games or listening to Korean K-pop.
Gen Y
Gen Yers were born between 1986 and 2002.
They already make up nearly one-third of the U.S. population, and they spend $170 billion a year of their own and their parents’ money.
They are “jugglers” who value being both footloose and connected to their “peeps” 24/7.
Gen Yers love brands like Sony, Patagonia, Gap, Aveda, and Apple.
Three major forces have shaped their experience:
Economy
Globalization
Social media
Gen Yers tend to hold relatively traditional values and they prefer to fit in rather than rebel.
Their acculturation agents stress teamwork, team teaching, team grading, collaborative sports, community service, service learning, and student juries.
Although they spend much of their time on social media, about one third say they avoid advertising on these sites. They would rather connect with brands by receiving product samples and attending sponsored events.
Gen X
The Gen X age subculture consists of 46 million Americans who were born between 1965 and 1985.
Advertisers fell all over themselves to create messages that would not turn off the worldly Generation X cohort.
Gen Xers have grown up, and in fact members of this generation are responsible for many culture-changing products and companies such as Google, YouTube, and Amazon.
A book that laments the bad rap Gen X has gotten sums it up: X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft But Can Still Keep Everything from Sucking.
13-2 Our memberships in ethnic, racial, and religious subcultures often guide our consumption choices.
Ethnicity and acculturation
Acculturation is the process of movement and adaptation to one country’s cultural environment by a person from another country.
The person’s contact with acculturation agents—people and institutions that teach the ways of a culture—are also crucial.
The progressive learning model helps us to understand the acculturation process.
We expect that when people acculturate, they will mix the practices of their original culture with those of their new or host culture.
The authors describe a process of warming, which they describe as transforming objects and places into those that feel cozy, hospitable, and authentic.
Deethnicization occurs when a product we link to a specific ethnic group detaches itself from its roots and appeals to other groups as well.
The “ big three” American ethnic subcultures
African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Asian Americans account for much of the current growth of the United States.
The Hispanic population is now the largest ethnic subculture.
Asian Americans, though much smaller in absolute numbers, are the fastest-growing racial group.
African Americans make up more than 13 percent of the U.S.
13-1 Consumer identity derives from “we” as well as “I.”
Ethnic and racial subcultures
We’ll look at some of the external linkages that play a big role in defining who we are and what we value: gender, race/ethnicity, religion, age, and where we live. Each of these is a subculture, which is a group whose members share significant beliefs and common preferences.
In a high-context culture, group members tend to be tightly knit, and they infer meanings that go beyond the spoken word.
In contrast, people who belong to a low-context culture are more literal.
Many minority cultures are high context and have strong oral traditions, so consumers are more sensitive to nuances in advertisements that go beyond the message copy.
13-4 Our traditional notions about families are outdated.
Family structure
Family size depends on such factors as educational level, the availability of birth control, and religion.
Marketers keep a close eye on the population’s birth rate to gauge how the pattern of births will affect demand for products in the future.
The extended family used to be the most common family unit.
The 1950s, the nuclear family—a mother, a father, and one or more children (perhaps with a sheepdog thrown in for good measure)—largely replaced the extended family, at least in U.S. society.
The U.S. Census Bureau regards any occupied housing unit as a household regardless of the relationships among the people who live there so one person living alone, three roommates, or two lovers (whether straight or gay) constitute a household.
Family needs and expenditures change over time, marketers apply the family life cycle (FLC) concept to segment households.
To need to focus on four variables to adequately describe family life-cycle stages changes:
Age
Marital status
The presence or absence of children in the home, and
The ages of children, if present
When updating our outlook, we identify a set of categories that includes many more types of family situations. Consumers we classify into these categories show marked differences in consumption patterns
13-5 We have many things in common with others because they are about the same age.
Children: Consumers – in – training
A recent study found that kids whose parents use products to shape behavior are more likely to be materialistic as adults.
Parental yielding occurs when a parental decision maker “surrenders” to a child’s request.
13-7 Baby Boomers are the most economically powerful age segment.
Baby Boomers
The Baby Boomer age subculture consists of people whose parents established families following the end of World War II and during the 1950s when the peacetime economy was strong and stable.
As a general rule, when people feel confident about how things are going in the world.
As the Restylane campaign demonstrates, this generation is much more active and physically fit than its predecessors.
Baby Boomers are 6 percent more likely than the national average to engage in some kind of sports activity.
A study found that the majority of Boomers want to be “surprised and delighted” by brands.
Demographers distinguish between two subgroups of Baby Boomers:
“Leading-edge” boomers, born between 1946 and 1955, grew up during the Vietnam War and Civil Rights eras.
“Trailing-edge” boomers, who were born between 1956 and 1964, came of age after Vietnam and the Watergate scandal.
The Great Recession had a greater impact on trailingedge boomers than leading-edge boomers.
13-8 Seniors are a more important market segment than many marketers realize.
Seniors
Few of us may be around then, but we can already see the effects of the senior market today.
Many marketers neglected the elderly in their feverish pursuit of the youth market. But as our population ages and we live longer and healthier lives, the game is rapidly changing.
The newer, more accurate image is of an active person who is interested in what life has to offer, who is an enthusiastic consumer with the means and willingness to buy many goods and services, and who maintains strong loyalty to favorite brands over the years.
The United Nations says that people older than 60 are the fastest-growing age group on Earth.
Larger numbers of older people lead more active, multidimensional lives than we assume.
A person’s mental outlook and activity level have a lot more to do with longevity and quality of life than does chronological age, the actual number of years the person has actually
been alive. That’s why perceived age, or how old a person feels, is a better yardstick to use.
Researchers measure perceived age on several dimensions, including “feel-age” (i.e., how old a person feels) and “look-age” (i.e., how old a person looks).
The older consumers get, the younger they feel relative to their actual age.
13-9 Birds of a feather flock together in place-based subcultures
Place – based subcultures
Geodemography refers to analytical techniques that combine data on consumer expenditures and other socioeconomic factors with geographic information about the areas in which people live to identify consumers who share common consumption patterns.
One popular clustering technique is Nielsen’s PRIZM system.
Residents of different clusters display marked differences in their consumption of products, from annuities to Ziploc bags.
The system also ranks these groupings by income, home value, and occupation (i.e., a rough index of social class) on a ZQ (Zip Quality) scale.