Culture and Consumption

Culture influences and is influenced by language, communication, products, and behavior patterns (Raaij, 1997). Cultures can imitate their neighbors through dissemination, borrowing, and mimicking, and adjust themselves to meet the biological and psychological needs and desires of the individuals in a cultural system (Güvenç, 1994, p.103).

Unlike innate biological characteristics (e.g. sex, skin, or hair color), culture is learned. We begin to acquire a set of beliefs, values, and customs that shape our culture from our social environment at an early age. For children, the learning of these acceptable cultural values and customs is reinforced by the process of playing with their toys. When children play, they animate and rehearse important cultural lessons and situations. This cultural learning prepares them for real-life circumstances in the future (Schiffman, Hansen and Kanuk, 2012, p.343).

A culture production system has three primary subsystems (Solomon, 2017, p.518):

1. A creative subsystem to create new symbols and products.

2. A managerial subsystem to choose, materialize, produce, and manage the distribution of new symbols and products.

3. A communications subsystem to give meaning to the new product and assign a set of symbolic attributes to it.

Culture is discovered. Culture is built by people. However, since culture is an accumulation of long years, people also discover it beginning from the moment they were born. Therefore, culture is independent from people.

Culture is learned. Culture is not a system of values that is innate or transmitted genetically. One learns culture through his/her family and environment after he/she was born.

Culture is traditional. Culture involves behavior standards suitable for shared mentality and thoughts of the members of a society.

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.

Culture can change. Change takes a long time; new cultural norms do not instantly sweep the old ones away and new norms coexist along with the old ones.

Culture involves not only similarities but also differences. Almost all cultures have shared values, norms, and behavior patterns. However, the same elements vary across subcultures.

Culture is an organization and a union. Each culture has its distinctive types of organization.

Culture is conformity. People accommodate themselves to cultural norms and values in order not to be excluded.

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 (Schiffman, Hansen and Kanuk, 2012, p.348).

Culture is conformity. People accommodate themselves to cultural norms and values in order not to be excluded.

People continue to follow cultural beliefs, values, and customs as long as they gratify. However, when a specific standard no longer satisfies the members of the society, that standard is retouched or replaced.

Culture can change. Change takes a long time; new cultural norms do not instantly sweep the old ones away and new norms coexist along with the old ones. The old norms can disappear after living together with the new ones for a long time. Technological advances and consequently, innovations in communications are among the important factors that speed up cultural change and conformity.

Culture is not static. If it is to serve the best interests of society, culture must continually evolve to fulfill its need-gratifying role. Therefore, the marketer must carefully monitor the sociocultural environment to market an existing product more effectively or to develop promising new products (Schiffman, Hansen and Kanuk, 2012, p.348).

• Ecology—It is the way a system adapts to its habitat. It is the primary among the factors that shape the biological culture of geography. The technology a culture uses to obtain and transmit resources shapes its ecology.
• Social structure— It is the way people maintain an orderly and steady social life. Family structures, social organizations and political groups (e.g., the nuclear family and the extended family) are considered as part of this area.
• Ideology— It is the mental characteristics of a society and the way its people communicate their environment and social groups. It is considered that the members of a society have a common worldview and share certain principles about order and justice.

The character of a society includes its language, knowledge, laws, religion(s), food customs, music, art, technology, work patterns, products and other man-made objects.

Cultural values can be defined as a set of reasonable and approved beliefs, or from the viewpoint of sociology, as the total of beliefs and ideas on efforts, relations, desires, and purposes that have importance for a society’s identity (İslamoğlu and Altunışık, 2017, p.179). Beliefs consist of the very large number of mental or verbal statements that reflect a person’s knowledge or assessment of something (another person, a shop, a product, or a brand) (Schiffman, Hansen and Kanuk, 2012, p.342).

A limitation to behavior defined by culture is named as a norm. For example taking shoes off when entering homes, offering drinks to guests, 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.

Language is probably the most obvious difference among cultures and is defined as a cultural mirror; that reflects the characteristics of the culture it represents (Bradley, 2002, p.98). Language is the major means of distinguishing among cultural groups. The classifications of people’s ways of perceiving the world are formed by language. Language defines people’s perception of the world, thereby affecting a society’s mentality and the way of thinking. In this sense, language and perception are intertwined with each other. Culture defines how people perceive the environment they live in. In other words, people cannot understand the physical world surrounding them without the help of culture. The perceived world is a product of the mutual interaction between the physical aspects of the universe and what people learn from their experiences, and language and symbols are the means of transmitting it (Er, 2019, p.105).

A ritual is a set of multiple, symbolic behaviors that are practiced in a fixed sequence and repeated periodically (Solomon, 2017, p.523). Christmas and new year celebrations are one such situation. In consumption culture, rituals can be devised. However, it is also possible to modify the contents and meanings of traditionally existing rituals; by doing so, the consumption element can be emphasized. Therefore, the types of rituals and transferring their meanings to consumers have importance. For a product or service to be consumed; specific content, roles in rituals, and an audience have to contribute to building the elements of social consumption rituals (Odabaşı, 2006, p.75). As such, the repeated practice of consumption during these periods have allowed these rituals to disperse to other cultures.

Nationality, religion, geographical region, age, gender, profession, and social class are various categories of subcultures.

For more information, refer to Table 6.2 in the source material.

Material culture refers to material objects made and used by people, such as buildings, artwork, tools, machines, and vehicles. These objects build man-made environments in between the individuals and the physical environment, which substantially affects human behaviors (Bradley, 2002, p.100). Material culture can also serve as a buffer between humankind and nature. For instance, while people built small houses as shelters to protect themselves from nature in ancient times, they, in time, started to build houses for their privacy; and now, they can build natural disaster-proof houses (Rızkalla, Wertheim and Hodgson, 2008, p.32).

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.

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):

1. Beliefs, values, and customs specific to a particular subculture that is shared by its members.

2. Main cultural elements independent of subcultures that are shared by a great majority of society.

The relationship between consumer behavior and culture is like a two-way street. On the one hand, consumers are more likely to embrace products and services that appeal to a culture’s priorities at any given time. On the other hand, researching new products and innovations on product design successfully produced by the culture at any given time provides an insight into the dominant cultural ideals of that period (Solomon et. al., 2006, p.500).

Culture is associated with what the members of a society regard as a necessity and what they consider as a luxury. For instance, when asked whether a cell phone or an iPod is a necessity or a luxury, the participants’ answers will vary depending on cultures (Schiffman, Hansen and Kanuk, 2012, p.343). In the case of the electric toothbrush, it is seen as a necessity in Japan, but a luxury in India.

In a consumption-oriented society, the meaning is conveyed two different ways. First, marketing strategies are designed to move cultural meanings from physical and social environments into products and services to make them appeal to consumers. Second, consumers actively put effort to get these cultural meanings in products to establish the desired personal identity or self-concept.

The dictionary definition of enculturation is this: the gradual acquisition of the characteristics and norms of a culture or group by a person, another culture. A vital part of the enculturation role of the family is the socialization of the young as a consumer. This process involves teaching fundamental consumerrelated values and skills (such as the meaning of money), the relationship between price and quality, determining product tastes, preferences and habits, and methods of giving appropriate reactions to various promotional messages (Schiffman, Hansen and Kanuk, 2012, p.348).

The cultural meanings of products are likely to vary across different societies. For example, most societies have favorite foods that represent important meanings for them but do not stand for those meanings in other cultures—Danish love eel, Mexicans love chilies, Irish love Guinness which is a type of dark beer, French love cheese, Americans love hamburgers (Peter and Olson, 2010, p.288).

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). Global consumption culture describes the cultural identities of larger groups that are not merely related to one single country, that are generally international and whose members are not confined with their own national cultures.

Cultural differences have importance, particularly for the global markets. Because culture differs from one region to another, and with this aspect, it has a potential to influence the success of global marketing. The differences between the cultures of countries have a power that can directly affect the marketed items and services as well as the marketing methods (Akat, 1996, p.45).