Wanting, needing and knowing the difference

Wanting, needing and knowing the difference

‘Material goods serve more than just our survival needs;
they meet our culturally defined wants as well” (Spradley 1997: 153)


Human beings are strange creatures; we need only a hand full of things in order to survive namely: water, food, shelter, clothing and companionship (Petroglyph). In theory, this would then mean that if these basic needs were met we would be content. Building on this one would also assume that the way in which these needs are met would have little effect on our happiness (Douglas & Isherwood; 1978). Reality on the other hand tells a completely different story, the way we attach value to an object bears little resemblance to either the production cost or the contribution it makes towards our survival (Foster; 2005). Advertisers have make millions by turning needs into wants (Bisseker; 2002). Sure, you may need a new jacket when winter rolls along, but only clever advertising or a brain tumour would make you spend US$4995.95 (Designer Exposure; 2006) on something that is going to be out of style next season. What we need to do then is look at the way in which we attach value to goods to better understand how our culture determines not only what we want, but also how badly we want it (Jay, 1970; Douglas&Isherwood).

Discussion

You would think that a few million years of evolution would mean that humans were immune to such trivial temptations such as advertising. After all, we did manage to put a man on the moon. Even I fell prey to Douglas&Isherwood’s theory when I went through the reading material. Although I was willing to admit that maybe other people fell into the advertisement trap, I was sure that I was immune. As I slipped into my Guess jeans, put on my YDE t-shirt and donned my Diesel sneakers however, I could feel doubt slowly creeping in through the back door. This made me take a look around and I could not help noticing how just about everything in my room was branded in some way, not even something as basic as toothpaste was left unaffected.

Brands invoke a strange sort of loyalty in the typical consumer, Foster (2005) even goes as far as calling it ‘loyalty beyond reason’. What is it that compels us to spend our hard-earned cash on something that technically either we don’t really need, or we could’ve gotten for a whole lot less? (Jay,1970; Barth,1970; Douglas&Isherwood) Part of the reason will undoubtedly be ‘real’ benchmarks such as quality and value for money, but studies on consumer behaviour shows that habit plays a greater roll that we would care to admit (Foster, 2005; Wikipedia). I am guilty of always buying a certain type of coffee and when there is none available, rather go without or have tea than risk another brand. There is nothing unique about my brand of coffee, you boil the water; add it to the soluble granules and coffee happens. Why then the reluctance to change?

Once a brand becomes imbedded in your routine and way of thinking, it is almost impossible to even think of using something else (Foster, 2005; Douglas&Isherwood, 1978). Until the next one catches your heart of course, when all the loyalty goes straight out the window (Wikipedia). What makes us stick to one brand or later makes us switch to another? One culprit is the influence outside groups such as friends and family have on us as consumers, another would be advertising. Apart from economic factors and actual quality considerations, these are the main reasons for choosing a particular product. Consumer behaviour studies spend vast amounts of time and money on figuring out exactly why we buy the things we do, along with how, when and what. This service is invaluable to producers since knowing what the public wants would give them an advantage when the time comes for them to sell their product (Wikipedia). In today’s highly competitive society, it becomes ever more important to make your product stand out above the rest, thus maintaining and expanding your market share (Foster, 2005).

Before we focus on the different ways this is achieved, let us look at the basic models for consumer behaviour, along with a basic models of buyer decision making. There are two fundamental models of consumer behaviour that can each be applied with varying degrees of success. The first of these is Howard&Sheth, they start by grouping the different stimuli that influence a consumer in the decision making process in order to better analyse their effect. The first; significative, refers to the material aspects of a product/service. The second; symbolic, refers to associations and ideas attached by the supplier. The third; social, refers to the ideology attached to a certain product by a culture and different social groups within this society. In this model, these inputs are seen as complete, with all possible stimuli of being grouped in one of them. The ‘outputs’ will of course then be the result of these stimuli on the consumer’s behaviour, or at least those that you can see. However knowing what influences a customer and what his or her end reaction is to all of this still doesn’t explain why they’ll buy a certain product (service). Howard&Sheth divides this decision making process into two areas. One; perceptual, referring to those involved with getting and managing information about the product (service). Two; learning, referring to the actual accumulation of knowledge, that led to the final decision.

The second model we will briefly discuss is known as the Engel-Kollat-Blackwell model and this follows a more mechanistic approach. They operate in the realm of evolutionary economics, where customers become causative forces operating within set conventions that are easy to pursue and implement. These conventions contain limited information and only a slight capacity for elaboration. This postulates that a customer identifies a certain need and after he or she has decided which group of goods satisfies it, sets a budget and uses this as the main driving force when selecting a particular item for consumption (Wikipedia). This very basic theory fails to take taste and other socially driven driving forces into account as named in Douglas&Isherwood (1978); Jay (1970); Barth (1970); Gell (1988).

These models provide us with part of the how, the actual decision-making process now bears closer examination. There are three possible analytical models for achieving this. These are the economic, psychological and consumer behaviour models. The consumer behaviour models usually a combination between the other two, which is why I chose to discuss it. Perception of a product plays an important part when it comes to choosing that I will now discuss ways suppliers use to influence them. The most prominent one is advertising, that comes in myriad forms and surrounds us everyday (Wikipedia). Another less obvious one is propaganda, either from society as a whole, or specific groups (Douglas&Isherwood, 1978; Foster, 2005; Gell, 1988; Jay, 1970; Wikipedia). I didn’t realise just how bombarded we are by ads until I picked up my October issue of Cosmopolitan and decided to count the pages taken up with full-page advertisements. Cosmopolitan is a popular woman’s magazine that caters for young women between the ages of 18 and 34. They have a total readership of 758 000 so it should give a good indication of how much influence advertising exerts on our lives. The magazine in question had 318pages including the front and back covers, of these pages 156 were taken up by full colour advertisements. Such an advertisement doesn’t come cheap with prices running at R41500, 00 for a single page and R99792, 00 for a double page spread on the first pages (Cosmo Website). No wonder companies go through so much trouble trying to figure out exactly what customers want (Foster 2005).

I also mentioned propaganda, for this essay, I will loosely define it as promotion. In this particular context, I took every time readers were told to buy a product as propaganda, but only counted it when actual prices were named and if I had not already counted them under the general advertisements. This added another 70 pages out of my total of 318 that were attempting to persuade readers to buy certain products. Together with the ‘pure’ advertisements, this meant that just over 71% of the magazine was dedicated to some type of product promotion.

These advertisements are aimed at a specific market and there exists a wide variety of advertisements, all thus aimed at certain demographic groups (Bisseker, 2002). Agencies take into account not only the demand for a certain product, but also the social structures that would support their campaign. This specialization is another way that culture affects the products we choose. Companies would not be able to play on things such as status and social stratification if they weren’t there to begin with (Barth, 1970; Gell, 1988; Jay, 1970; Wikipedia) . By making people feel envious of others and prompting them to emulate those they perceive as successful these companies are not creating a new niche, they are simply exploiting an existing one (Douglas&Isherwood, 1978). This particular technique for example would fail if used on the Muria in India since they have no wish to set themselves apart from the rest financially (Gell, 1988).

Conclusion

There may not be a group of people going around from town to town telling people what to wear and how to think, but that doesn’t mean that our social environment holds no sway in our behaviour. We are bombarded by cultural conditioning wherever we go, be it in the form of television, books or advertising and whether we’d like to admit it or not, it does play a role in the choices we make (Bisseker, 2002; Douglas&Isherwood, 1978; Foster,2005; Jay,1970) . At the end of the day it is still a choice however and nobody can blame a foolish purchase on clever advertisement (Douglas&Isherwood, 1978). Our choices spring from a variety of different factors and stimuli that we analyse to find the right one for us (Wikipedia), thus nobody else can take the blame if we make a mistake. In this essay, I have focussed primarily on material commercial goods, may be in part, because my culture tells me that is important (Foster, 2005).

References

Barth, F. 1970 ‘Management and Stratification’ in Firth, R. (ed.) Themes in Economic Anthropology Tavistock Publications pp.165-167

Cosmopolitain Magazine ‘Cosmopolitain Rate Card:Our Cosmo World’ http://www.cosmopolitan.co.za/main/intros/info/magspecs06/cosmo/cosmo_rate_card_2006.htm 01 October 2006

Designer Exposure, ‘Main Collection: Womens designer coats’ http://www.designerexposure.com/category/26a2/ALL 01 October 2006

Douglas, M. & Isherwood,B 1978 ‘Why People Want Goods’ in The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption London: Routledge pp.15-24

Douglas, M. & Isherwood,B 1978 ‘The Uses of Goods’ in The World of Goods: Towards an Anthropology of Consumption London: Routledge pp.56-70

Financial Mail, Bisseker, T. 2002 ‘ Media: It’s not all doom and gloom for the industry’ http://free.financialmail.co.za/report/adfocus2002/media/med11.htm 01 October 2006

Foster, R.J. 2005 ‘Commodity Futures: Labour, Love and Value’ in Anthropology Today 21(4): 8-12

Gell, A. 1988 ‘Newcomers to the world of Goods: Consumption among the Muria Gond’s’ in Appadurai,A. (ed.) The social life of things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.110-138

Jay, L. 1970 ‘Social and Economic Determinants in Behaviour’ in Firth,R. (ed.) Themes in Economic Anthropology Tavistock Publications pp.30-32

Petroglyph National Monument: Teacher resources ‘Needs: What do we need to survive?’
http://www.nps.gov/archive/petr/teachers/needtosurvive.htm 01 October 2006

Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia ‘Consumer Behaviour’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_behaviour 01 October 2006

Wikepedia, the free Encyclopedia ‘Buyer decision process’ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buyer_decision_processes" 01 October 2006