Consumer Psychology
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Two processes then can occur and I have called them dissolution and appreciation . The latter will be dealt with when we look at ownership and possession in detail in Chapter 10 although I have included a section here also and will mention usage and maintenance as two important ways we treat our purchases and gifts. Dissolution will be looked at in the last section here. These two pathways diverge in that one is where we try and get rid of things and the other is where we keep them. In both cases we transform and change them although where this is obvious in dissolution it is less obvious and needs some explaining in the appreciation phase. One final comment and that is the goods that we receive for ourselves and our home are not necessarily bought and we need to deal with the psychology of gift giving and receiving in Chapter 10 as the structure of these rituals underwrites so much of the theory of exchange which is the lynch pin of much consumer behaviour. 4
Ownership and Possession: Routines and Renewal
This is the first part of how we look after our goods (and services, although this is intangible and less obvious). A more thorough psychological analysis of ownership and possession will be given later in Chapters 10 and 11. However for many items we buy, we need to maintain them and also to refresh them. This does not just mean keeping up with fashion and buying a new dress, suit, or trainers 5 but it also means a more regular, routine based ritual called family shopping. This will take place once a week depending on the size of the family, often on Sunday and we’ll look at that shortly.
For some major items like homes , 6 purchase can also be an investment. Buying ‘off plan’ can see the value of the property increase when the plans are transformed into bricks and mortar. In a market where demand outstrips supply, a 10% deposit at the off plan stage can see a profit of 10% taken at the full price purchase stage although property markets at the time of writing are quite volatile depending on which region of the UK is being looked at. On the other hand cars, another major item for many families, if bought new, slump in value and the AA (2017) estimate 20% of the new car value (bought new) is lost each year of ownership. Even for big ticket items for some people the fact that no-one has lived in this place before or no-one has driven this car before me could have high perceived value and needs to be factored into the consumer psychology behind purchase. ‘Second-hand’ could be anathema for some people and although there is some work done on this in psychology relating it to basic emotions such as disgust and prejudice based on fear of contamination (see Hodson & Costello, 2007), there is little consumer research in this specific area of dislike for second-hand goods. There is however research into ‘brand new’ or rather ‘unspoilt’ in the context of leisure tourism and the appeal of the wild. For example Vistad and Vorkinn (2012) have established that the concept of purism , a concept characterised by high expectations of and sensitivity to variations in the quality of something, was relevant to the wilderness experience where pristine and untouched would be the words that immediately come to mind as desirable end states. There is a parallel here with the ‘nose against the shop window’ approach one gets in videos on TV or the internet about the lives of the ultra-rich and famous where the bar is raised to a ridiculous level concerning the quality of hotel rooms, private yachts, jets or hide-away secret islands. Contamination or any indication that other people have been there or used any of the facilities is forbidden. Maintenance is often necessary to maintain the value of the purchase and if they are on public display they might need to be cleaned, polished, ironed, or scrubbed. Although with present day materials this is not quite the chore it was in previous generations and today’s family can wear no-iron clothes or else hang them up damp in centrally heated rooms, and order meals online and have them delivered by Deliveroo.
Brand Loyalty Revisited
Many families will go shopping to supermarkets and repeat purchases are made over the weeks and months as brand loyalty builds up and one’s supermarket checkout bill becomes more predictable, providing a signature for marketers to identify and classify your patterns of consumption . The usual scenario of brand loyalty however for repeat purchase goods (known as Fast Moving Consumer Goods or FMCGs) is a simple one where there is a cycle of initial purchase leading to consumer satisfaction then repeat purchase and so on. It involves some psychology and the model can be modified by replacing the goal of ‘repeat purchase’ with achieving the goal of getting on the mental shortlist of those brands or generic products that might be ranked according to their substitutability should the most preferred brand not be available. The marketer then might aim to get on to the shortlist of customers’ likely purchases of, for example lunch box items for their children.
However the metaphor of customers being loyal to brands is in my opinion looking rather limited and stale and needs some refreshing. Hollebeek (2011) uses the term engagement that seems to have greater potential for linking into a variety of consumer psychological processes relevant for consumption (op. cit., Table 2). So engagement can operate behaviorally, cognitively and emotionally; it can vary in intensity; it can invade various identities that constitute the self 7 and so on. In addition FMCG shopping is a recurring activity that for large families can occur twice a week with the occasional forays to corner shops and branded supermarket city centre retail outlets such as Tesco Metro. So we have a complex environment and a simple model of purchasing certain FMCGs during the main family shop can be replaced with engagement with both brands and site whether it’s Waitrose, Lidl, or Tesco. Shopping strategy could be for example using two sites, say Waitrose for perceived quality and service and Lidl for cheapness and one can end up choosing different, less familiar brands of chocolate and wine at Lidl because of the ambience 8 of the place. And then a farm shop 9 for fresh vegetables.
In summary from renewing and refreshing household stock with supermarket shopping, to buying and looking after major investments like a house or a car both of which will last for years are all everyday consumer activities. Not all of us will have invested in these, and we might rent and use public transport, but at some stage in the life cycle there’s a chance that house and car maintenance will form part of our lives as consumers.
Dissolution
Getting rid of the waste products from daily consumption in the household is a well-defined activity in the UK although there are regional variations. In many households a regular output of bottles, cans, plastic, and paper are sorted inside the home into recycling or landfill and placed in the appropriate bins in the street where they are emptied by the local authorities at regular intervals. At the time of writing local town and regional councils in the UK are trying to operate with shrinking budgets and cutting back landfill collections is one such economy councils can make although at the time of writing recycling services are still operating at regular weekly intervals. In other poorer parts of the world such as Freetown, Sierra Leone trash dumps are scavenged by young children (Action Aid, 2015) with the consequent risks of disease.
That’s the simplest way of ridding ourselves of things we don’t want but there are other ways of enabling these unwanted products to re-enter the world of goods and services in different forms. Starting immediately after the exploration phase then if you don’t like or want what you bought, maybe it doesn’t fit properly or it looks hideous on, then take it back and get your money back. Shops compete with each other for customers so expect to be given that facility and use it. It can be abused where some customers who don’t want to try on different clothes in the shop buy three or four and take back the ones they don’t want and get fully refunded.
Goods that enter the household are often redistributed within the family when the owner has finished with them. For example 60 years ago in the UK as children got older and outgrew their clothes these were then transferred to younger family members. This has fallen out of use now and children’s clothes are sold cheaply in supermarkets such as Asda in the UK with their line of George clothes. However redistribution of possessions in the family is an interesting solut
ion which is economically useful and reminds us that any discussion of individual consumer behaviour and the underlying psychology should not neglect decision making at a collective level by the household or family for example. The direction of redistribution need not just be from older to younger and ownership can be collective where sisters share clothes and cosmetics. In my case as an older member of my family I get a smartphone when my daughter upgrades! Little research has been done on the traffic of goods within families, especially larger more extended families.
Often clothes and other stuff will ‘disappear into the closet’ which means ‘out of sight—out of mind’. You can’t see it so your home is ‘tidy’ but it’s not gone and you can always get it as it’s still part of your home. But the problem of how to get rid of stuff hasn’t gone away. Hoarding in the sense of being unable to let go of possessions has a pathological aspect and has now entered the standard diagnostic manual (DSM-V) for psychiatrists and clinical psychologists (see Mataix-Cols et al., 2010). However for many people the need to ‘clear out’ unwanted stuff that’s been ‘cluttering up’ parts of the home becomes urgent. 10 There are various solutions to this problem of too much stuff. Town and regional Councils will often offer to remove unwanted goods, given enough notice and for a small fee (see Brosius , Fernandez, & Cherrier, 2013, p. 290, Table 1 for an international perspective). Also, what used to be known as ‘the tip’ has been resurrected as a recycling centre and upgraded with drive-in bays for different categories of recyclable goods. This resource is often offered free, with charges for certain materials and some offer re-sale facilities with good bargains, although this is by no means consistent across the UK. A recent TV series on the BBC (BBC, 2018) called Money for Nothing, involved entrepreneurial presenter Sarah Moore getting items for free from users of a recycling centre, renovating them and putting them up for sale or in some cases constructing a new object. This morality tale means that value can still be found from objects that the user doesn’t want and encourages repairing as an option on the agenda. There’s another story though which is that items that appear to be at the end of their life are not just to be disposed of in an environmentally more acceptable way but can be used as raw material to construct better, more aesthetic and desirable objects. Brosius et al. (2013) used the term ‘lateral recycling ’ to describe this process of reusing; the example cited by the authors is one which many of us will recognise as it’s using a bottle for a lamp base. Add Chianti as the brand name with some melted candle tallow on the glass and we have contributed the dubious added value of iconic kitsch. When Sarah Moore asks customers to give her their unwanted items at the recycling centre she will use these scavenged fragments to construct tables for example which retail for three and four figure sums. Time will tell whether this will be tomorrow’s kitsch. Brosius et al. (op. cit.) borrows the term ‘inorganic collection 11 to cover foraging usable material from skips (dumpsters). For example renovation can increase value and dismantling and reconstruction can produce a different more up-to-date product. Here is another example of the blurring of the role of production and consumption .
Toward a Theory of Recycling
Before we leave this topic it might be worthwhile putting together the elements of a theory that can cover repair, renovation, disposal, re-use, ‘prosumption ’, 12 consumption, production, recycling and variations on that theme. These terms (and I’m sure there are others) are used frequently. Let’s say you’ve bought a mid-range product/brand e.g. a new steam cleaner that sprays steam over the floor with a cloth attachment that wipes it up or it can be used to clean stoves, showers, bathroom surfaces etc. It works, it’s new, and you are learning so it has a life in the ecology of the household where it lives in a cupboard in the kitchen and is used frequently. You reorder some fresh cloths through Amazon as the original one gets worn and then you blow a fuse in the plug and have to replace the fuse so you have repaired it to that extent. Gradually you become less interested and the appliance ceases to having a privileged existence in the kitchen cupboard and is relegated to the shed out back. You are now (a year or so later) looking for a high end version that produces proper steam as you noticed the old one (that’s what you call it) is only producing a thin jet and it’s something to do with hard water but you don’t want to know. 13 Many purchases for the household have a limited performance time on the front line as it were and soon drift to places of rest. I suppose you will have a place where these objects lie whether it’s the cupboard under the stairs, the shed/garage, or simply migration to the unreachable and untouched recesses of closets, drawers, cupboards or shelves. 14 The days of purchase, excited unwrapping, assembly and trying out your toys for grown-ups from a new car to a NutriBullet are in the past.
Its time has come. Spring is here and the indulgence and consumption of the various winter festivals are firmly in the past and growth and newness is all around. It’s time to get rid of all that stuff gathering dust in parts of the home . There are various ways of doing this and they all involve various degrees of transformation. We’ve already described ‘disappear’ which is an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ change and the next would be repair and restore where needle and thread are used on clothes (an increasingly rare and uncommon activity), walls are given a layer of paint 15 and even stripped pine dressers and tables get the cool grey treatment. But for some stuff banishment is the only solution. The most radical (and illegal) of these is fly-tipping which, as councils cut back on spending for essential services related to disposal is becoming a serious problem in the UK. For many of us though some variation on the theme of constructive transformation of our junk, garbage, rubbish 16 is de rigueur these days. It is premised on the assumption there is worth and value there, if we can transform it. Sometimes the value is intrinsic and intangible and within the act itself. I am learning something about my life as a consumer when I religiously separate packaging into landfill, plastic, glass, paper etc. It’s a background part of many consumers’ lives these days and incidental learning 17 occurs. I know that my life spent sorting stuff at home into different bins is a tiny ineffective contribution to the world’s problems with pollution but installing that component of sorting and binning into a behavioural routine does help. I have made my contribution to recycling in the sense of household rubbish being separated into categories for further use in manufacturing and (hopefully) not all going to landfill.
Is that all? Each household as they consume fast moving consumer goods (FMCGs) are producing on a micro scale tidy green or black boxes, sacks and bins that are emptied with luck on a reasonably regular basis and this is part of the routine of most households. The scenario is more complex as we have upcycling and downcycling to consider. The directional part of these hybrids refers to value, whether the process increases (up) or decreases (down) it. So upcycling adds value by ‘breathing new life into old items’ and ‘reduces the demand for the use of new or raw materials in production ’. 18 In the latter case upcycling is better than production and adds value anyway. An example of downcycling would be reducing used bricks and concrete to ‘hard-core’ or compacted fill by smashing it up. There is value in the fill but less than in a similar volume of new bricks. Scrap merchants and demolition experts both downcycle and there is big money and profits in that trade. Prosumption has been looked at already and a useful analysis of its role in fashion can be found in Strähle and Grünewald (2017). These authors extend the concept of prosumption in the direction of greater consumer participation where consumers are involved the co-creation of various meanings of fashion and style and blogging new trends. The consumer will play a more active role in influencing a firm’s marketing strategies. Armed with a 3D printer and some CAD software, consumers can produce things but the power of the prosumption synthesis lies in switching of roles. I see prosumption at work ever since Mary Baker (or Betty Crocker) produced her famous cake mix in the middle of last century. You produce a meal but you have already bought some of the preparation. Or you are a prosum
er if you buy jeans then stonewash them or slash them. I can see the power of extending the term to cover consumers who advocate on your behalf or act as a brand ambassadors but I also see how broadening the concept consequently weakens it. Maybe we need to talk of Prosumption 1.0 and Prosumption 2.0.
I mentioned above Sarah Moore trying to make money from nothing. Well not ‘nothing’ as the structure of each episode usually starts off with her going to a recycling centre and confronting (kindly and enthusiastically as she is not short of enthusiasm like all good presenters) a person who is getting rid of an undesirable thing from his or her household. But usually it either has style or good construction or made from ancient and valuable wood. Sarah has many friends who are metropolitans with a hipster ambience and gets on well with them all. She has produced a successful TV product and we know this because at the time of writing we have Celebrity money for nothing on our screens 19 as well. The trash/rubbish are then transformed and the range of changes rung is imaginative to say the least. The value added is aesthetic, functional and almost artistic although the pieces are not authored and all are sold and paid for by Sarah. Profit made is then taken back to the original person-at-the-tip who is now at home and we conclude with a moral signing off when profit is (usually) 20 given to charity as befits the BBC. So what’s happening here? We arrive at the end of one consumption cycle when trash/rubbish is being handed over to another (the tip or recycling centre) run by local government. Each piece of trash/rubbish has a history of consumption , probably a purchase or gift but it’s had its life and is at the first stage of another shorter life when it is due to be stripped of elements which might be sold on and the rest buried as landfill or burnt. But salvation is at hand! Sarah rescues one or two and hands them over to prosumers and money changes hands and a new life starts. The birth is greeted with delight by Sarah (she is also good at doing delight) and in the final scene photos of the reborn are shown to the original patron of the tip who is ‘amazed’.