Culture

A culture is a society’s personality.

A society’s culture includes its values, ethics, and the material objects its members produce. It is the accumulation of shared meanings and traditions among members of a society. We describe a culture in terms of ecology (the way people adapt to their habitat), its social structure, and its ideology (including moral and aesthetic principles).

We distinguish between high culture and low culture.

Social scientists distinguish between high (or elite) forms and low (or popular) forms of culture. Products of popular culture tend to follow a cultural formula and contain predictable components. However, these distinctions blur in modern society as marketers increasingly incorporate imagery from “high art” to sell everyday products.

Myths are stories that express a culture’s values, and in modern times marketing messages convey these values to members of the culture.

Myths are stories with symbolic elements that express the shared ideals of a culture. Many myths involve a binary opposition, defining values in terms of what they are and what they are not (e.g., nature versus technology). Advertising, movies, and other media transmit modern myths.

Many of our consumption activities—including holiday observances, grooming, and gift-giving—are rituals.

A ritual is a set of multiple, symbolic behaviors that occur in a fixed sequence and that we repeat periodically. Ritual is related to many consumption activities that occur in popular culture. These include holiday observances, giftgiving, and grooming.

A rite of passage is a special kind of ritual that marks the transition from one role to another. These passages typically entail the need to acquire ritual artifacts to facilitate the transition. Modern rites of passage include graduations, fraternity initiations, weddings, debutante balls, and funerals.

We describe products as either sacred or profane, and it’s not unusual for some products to move back and forth between the two categories.

We divide consumer activities into sacred and profane domains. Sacred phenomena are “set apart” from everyday activities or products. Sacralization occurs when we set apart everyday people, events, or objects from the ordinary. Objectification occurs when we ascribe sacred qualities to products or items that sacred people once owned. Desacralization occurs when formerly sacred objects or activities become part of the everyday, as when companies reproduce “one-of-a-kind” works of art in large quantities.

New products, services, and ideas spread through a population over time. Different types of people are more or less likely to adopt them during this diffusion process.

Diffusion of innovation refers to the process whereby a new product, service, or idea spreads through a population. Innovators and early adopters are quick to adopt new products, and laggards are slow. A consumer’s decision to adopt a new product depends on his or her personal characteristics as well as on characteristics of the innovation itself. We are more likely to adopt a new product if it demands relatively little behavioral change, is easy to understand, and provides a relative advantage compared to existing products.

Many people and organizations play a role in the fashion system that creates and communicates symbolic meanings to consumers.

The fashion system includes everyone involved in creating and transferring symbolic meanings. Many different products express common cultural categories (e.g., gender distinctions). Many people tend to adopt a new style simultaneously in a process of collective selection. According to meme theory, ideas spread through a population in a geometric progression much as a virus infects many people until it reaches epidemic proportions. Other perspectives on motivations for adopting new styles include psychological, economic, and sociological models of fashion.

Fashions follow cycles and reflect cultural dynamics.

The styles prevalent in a culture at any point in time reflect underlying political and social conditions. We term the set of agents responsible for creating stylistic alternatives a culture production system. Factors such as the types of people involved in this system and the amount of competition by alternative product forms influence the choices that eventually make their way to the marketplace for consideration by end consumers.

Fashions follow cycles that resemble the product life cycle. We distinguish between two extremes of fashion adoption, classics and fads, in terms of the length of this cycle.

Western (and particularly U.S.) culture has a huge impact around the world, although people in other countries don’t necessarily ascribe the same meanings to products as we do.

The United States is a net exporter of popular culture. Consumers around the world eagerly adopt U.S. products, especially entertainment vehicles and items they link to a U.S. lifestyle (e.g., Marlboro cigarettes, Levi’s jeans). Despite the continuing “Americanization” of world culture, some people resist globalization because they fear it will dilute their own local cultures. In other cases, they exhibit creolization as they integrate these products with existing cultural practices.

Products that succeed in one culture may fail in another if marketers fail to understand the differences among consumers in each place.

Because a consumer’s culture exerts such a big influence on his or her lifestyle choices, marketers must learn as much as possible about differences in cultural norms and preferences when they do business in more than one country. One important issue is the extent to which we need to tailor our marketing strategies to each culture. Followers of an etic perspective believe that people in many cultures appreciate the same universal messages. Believers in an emic perspective argue that individual cultures are too unique to permit such standardization; marketers must instead adapt their approaches to local values and practices. Attempts at global marketing have met with mixed success. In many cases this approach is more likely to work if the messages appeal to basic values or if the target markets consist of consumers who are internationally rather than locally oriented.