Approaches to Online Consumer Research - Circuit of Culture

Whilst Kozinets’ approach was on loyalty and segmentation, Moisander and Valtonen see customer research from profoundly cultural perspective that is based on assumption that we live in culturally constituted world that largely takes place through market.

The approach grounds heavily on social constructivism: social phenomenon such as consumption is developed in social contexts and the meaning comes to existence through the social institutions that give it meaning within in a culture. In this context, consumers, marketers and the marketplace are seen as producers of culture.  In this Circuit of Culture also institutional forms, marketing discipline and knowledge play crucial role.

The very idea of the approach is to produce cultural knowledge this joint cultural production. To analyze the marketplace by how cultural, social and material realities are produced, maintained, contested, negotiated and transformed through market place processes by the actors. Thus the theory is also essentially qualitative and interpretative.

Before going to each actor’s role in the production, let’s have a look on Moisander’s and Valtonen’s revised concept of culture.

What is culture?

Culture refers to systems of representation through which people make sense of their everyday life. These systems include institutionalized discourses that constitute the conditions for people to think, talk and act; and everyday discourses through which meaning along with cultural artifacts are produced and through which people e.g. express themselves and exert power on others in social life. The former is also produced and negotiated through the latter.

Culture permeates all of society and the meanings are continuously re-produced. It is network or system of embedded practices and representations (text, images, talk, and codes of behavior) or a system of that shape every aspect of social life. Cultural narratives, citing culturally shared meanings, norms and values give sense of structure and security in consumer’s life.

What is particular about cultural approach on marketing is that it shifts from brand performing to meanings of what the brand actually stands for. When the focus moves from material properties to symbolic properties, the analysis approaches what product/service actually offers and how it affects customers’ life. 

Forces of culture

Culture is produced through symbolic processes and practices of production and consumption. Marketer constructs meanings by creating images, narratives and fantasies around products/brands whereas consumer make use of, appropriate and give value to products/brands and symbolic meanings attached to them in rituals and practices of everyday life.

Marketer can be seen as the new middleman or mediator or culture. Marketer’s crucial role lays in connecting production to consumption and shaping products according to market expectations. Marketer also functions as significant shaper of taste (creating new wants, needs and consumption-oriented lifestyles). Moisander and Valtonen remind that this link can be real or rather specious through marketing functions. Meaning is not just produced through design, ads and marketing but also through the use to which consumers put these products in the practice of their everyday life. Consumers are seen as active players that constantly re-work the meaning that they consume.

Whereas Kozinets saw that marketers should treat community members as partners of promotion and distribution, the cultural approach questions whether culture could be managed. According to Moisander and Valtonen, consumers should not be studies as autonomous subjects or postmodern independent consumers but rather they should be studies with marketers together in dialogue as producers of culture.

Even though the power has been shifting from marketers to consumers, by no means is the relation between actors equal. The broad range of marketers is powerful cultural gatekeeper on deciding what is supplied and offered. Thus many of the consumer choices are largely pre-determined as gatekeepers narrow down the options. However, each group has their own role to reflect on in the system of representation where wants, meanings, ideas, norms and values associated with market place behavior are discursively produced.

The cultural approach on marketing focuses heavily on cultural structures and structures in use. The dynamics of consumption is seen more complex than the relation between products/brands and social status or extended self. Products/brands are seen as cultural artifacts, resources and carriers of meaning and culture orients social life through narratives, myths, issues taken-for-granted, role expectations and especially through implicit values, norms and relations of power they involve.  Prducts/brands can deliver powerful cultural myths in tangible form. The myths that products/brands embody prescribe an ideology with moral imperatives and a vision for the community to aspire to, thus giving people a sense of structure in life

Everyone can understand that gifts are inevitably related to interpersonal relationships. Consumption activities also play vital role in structuring seasonality and time: beer can be interpreted to symbolize “free time” and finally to embody the myth of Western freedom.  And in broader concept, the riot over Australians’ Boxing Kangaroo flag during Winter Olympic Games 2010 demonstrates well that products/brands embody strong cultural icons and myths. A flag representing fair play was ordered to take out from Aussie teams’ accommodation and later the occurrence got manifested in the figure of Boxing Beaver by Canadians.

How to approach culture?

The cultural approach on marketing highlights the cultural complexity of market environments that are increasingly multicultural and global. To accomplish a better understanding of the cultural contingency and complex market phenomena, shared cultural meanings and social relations are established. Analytics of cultural practice (ACP) focuses on individual and psychological research and can provide conceptual tools for gaining better understanding of the cultural complexity of the marketplace and for reflecting own role among with structures and other actors.

Moisander and Valtionen note that marketers seem to need to improve their ability to recognize and understand the prevalent symbols, myths, images, values and cultural narratives of the culture of their target markets to carry out successful, innovative, socially responsible and customer-oriented marketing strategies.

Target markets are within contemporary communities (tribes) that can be characterized as shifting gatherings of emotionally bonded people and they exist in no other form but the symbolically and ritually manifested commitment of their members. Thus virtual space as well can be seen momentary home for the tribe to gather symbolism to reaffirm the values of tribe. The primary marketing task is to support the tribe in its very being (tribal belonging) practices through which tribe is brought to in being. Supporting is the approach over controlling when consumers are taken as cultural co-developers over “target group”.

As discussed earlier, the marketing focus is moving from use value to symbolic value. In addition to this, understanding the linking value seems to be the ability of future marketer in our cultural universe. Linking value is product’s contribution to establishing and/or reinforcing bonds between individuals not between product and customers.

Conclusions

Cultural approach is vital in today’s multi-cultural and global market space .The cultural approach on marketing’s focus highlights that online societies are just one medium within whole culture. Thus it is obvious that marketing must intersect all the social spaces of culture by participation and the use of meanings and myths. This is obvious also in the notion of linking value.

With the support of communications theories Moisander and Valtonen call for discourse analysis to reflect the reality construction that is constructed through systems of representation. It is also great tool for increasingly powerful consumer communities to reflect their own role and update conceptions from the one of victim of capitalism. Thus approach calls actors to activate and take part as loyalty approach changes to creation.

Being in joint cultural production, on the other hand, also means that company must see the tribe as company’s network or even seeing itself as part of the tribe.  This furthermore means that marketers must lower company boundaries. As Kozinets noted, networks are build given things away even though in this case the approach of  is more in information and meaning sharing rather than top-down free sample campaigns. What I find myself questioning is that is business world ready to open up? On the flip side of the coin companies’ attempts to harness joint culture to business means has aroused a lot of controversy. And on the other hand, are consumers ready to revise their role and really to reflect their lifestyles? 

What kind of resources in money terms does it require to really understand and participate in the Circuit of Culture?  Companies still need and want to evaluate content in commercial terms (e.g. ratings for movies) when the case in reality is in qualitative affects (the meaning of going to movies, the meaning of the specific movie/genre in consumers' life).

References:

E-Tribalized Marketing? The Strategic Implications of Virtual Communities of Consumption

Kozinets, Robert V. 1999 European Management Journal, Vol. 17 (3) 253-267

Qualitative Marketing Research: A Cultural Approach 

Moisander, J. and Valtonen A. 2005, 1-20, Sage Publicications

Approaches to Online Consumer Research - Segmenting and Targeting

Let’s take a leap into the 1990s. Imagine how was the Internet like. How did you use it? Feels kind of a vague of a task, doesn’t it? Blogs and forums have been around for decades but e.g. YouTube was established just five years ago.  And in e-business five years feels like an eternity - just enough time to forget and start taking the services and applications available today for granted.

Against this scenery, Robert V. Kozinets perceptions of virtual communities seem rather fresh to a person who just started high-school in 1999. In his article “E-Tribalized Marketing? The Strategic Implications of Virtual Communities of Consumption” in European Management Journal (17/1999) he criticizes data-based marketing’s status by analyzing ways how to target, segment and approach virtual communities. Even though Web 2.0 exploded during the past decade, a breeze from the past can help us reflect how have we gone along.

Kozinets noted that most of virtual communities are structured around consumption activities and thus being important source of knowledge of what products/services are consumed and how.  Virtual communities of consumption, or e-tribes, include common social spaces where people with shared interest and enthusiasm create group-specific meanings and norms, which serve to organize interaction to maintain certain ambiance and order. How could a marketer gain understanding of these complex social communities? Kozinets suggests interaction- and fragmentation-based segmentation to target the most important virtual communities and community members.

Segmentation through interaction

Motives to go online are e.g. searching for information, reading the news and learning from products/services. We also may do all these things in a virtual community and even produce our own content. According to Kozinets, whether a person actually takes part in an e-tribe or not depends on the formation of identification: the relationship to the consumption activity as well as the intensity of relationship to the community. The more important the product/service is to a person’s psychological self-image, chances are that (s)he will pursue for a membership in that community. Usually a member of virtual community will progress from a visitor to an insider as (s)he gains online experience and discovers a group that meets her/his needs.

For segmenting members of virtual community, Kozinets distinguishes four different member types which are later used to analyze the interaction modes of each. Tourist lacks strong social ties to the group and has only a superficial or passing interest in the consumption activity. Minglers, too, have light interest to the consumption activity but have strong social ties to the community. Devotees have few social ties but on the other hand have strong enthusiasm about the subject. Insiders are both socially and factually interested in the community of consumption.

A member’s social orientation in this classification can thus be seen as individualistic (short-term personal gains) or relational (longer-term cooperation). Devotees and insiders which both have strong personal interest to the consumption activity are the most important targets of marketing. They are so called heavy users that within the community can upgrade tourists and minglers to their own level.

Member types are related interaction modes, which are informational, transformational, recreational and relational mode. Minglers and tourists whose factual interest is on superficial level tend to pursue recreational mode for their primarily selfish gains. Usually member’s interaction moves from factual information type of exchange to one that easily mixes factual and relational information in the social context.

Interaction-based segmentation is used to better recognize different opportunities and needs of each mode group. Analysis may help to pinpoint the virtual communities with the highest potential for positive consumer response.

Segmentation through fragmentation

Kozinets approaches segmentation and targeting mainly through the concept of loyalty, which is largely the criterion behind data-based and relationship marketing.  Fragmentation-based segmentation attempts to bring more dynamic understanding of the member loyalty of virtual communities of consumption. Contrary to economic terms of retention and switching, Kozinets considers customer involvement in the consumption activity as the basis of consumer loyalty. Thus loyalty should be taken as cultural and experimental terms of depth of experience and emotional devotion.

Fragmentation-based segmentation is based upon the observation that even a unified community will always include important divisions and micro-segment. Basically groups are arranged by members who share certain media forms, social communication modes and consumption tastes. But as virtual communities of consumption become more mainstream, communities differentiate through active re-articulation and spread into new factions which necessarily do not retain ties to old group.

According to Kozinets, effective marketing should account for this changing and politicizing nature of virtual communities. By following these different tastes of virtual community factions, marketers can find new product enhancements and ideas, differentiate new customer segments and gain richer understanding of how product/service is given meaning and appreciated in consumption.

Another loyalty feature of virtual consumption communities is that loyalty is two-dimensional. A member can be loyal to a particular product/service but disloyal to the community and vice versa. In marketing’s perspective it is crucial to recognize the influencers which can create group switching according their own tastes.

Virtual communal marketing

Internet provides B2C, C2C, one-to-many and many to many communications.  Online consumers are not only influenced by virtual communities but they’re also a part of their virtual reference groups. Thus, even though Kozinets type and interaction mode analysis is based on individual behavior, he sees that marketing to an entire community is more realistic that one-to-one.

Virtual communal marketing model (VCM), which rationale lays on naturalistic observation of online consumers in social interaction and the principles of network economies, could be seen as a solution that combines the customization of single node marketing approaches to the appreciation of communal consumption concerns that multiple nodes evoke. VCM’s focus is underlined in its assumptions that 1) consumers are active creators 2) marketing company-customer-relationship is a multimodal network and 3) the value of online data gathering of consumers lies in its multidimensional potentialities in addition to sales and demographics.

Communal consumption means that consumers create and negotiate their tastes; moderate product meanings; brand and re-brand together. To understand customer needs, consumption must be seen from this social context that encompasses multimodal relations. A portrait of community, factions or unique consumers’ interests can weave together different forms of consumption patterns and explain customer (dis)satisfaction.

Marketer’s goal is to use information in order to build long-lasting relationships between consumer and product/brand. In virtual communities of consumption the information is readily available thus offering an excellent venue for the marketing research that underlies the understanding that builds these relationships. VCM also offers a basis for pursuing a subscription or membership type of relationship.

How to approach e-tribes?

With VCM in mind, in addition to interaction-based and fragmentation-based segmentation, strategies for efficiently targeting desirable types of virtual communities and community members include opting, paying-for-attention and building networks by giving product away.

Online marketers should speak to a group and co-opt communities by sharing important information. Kozinets proposes to treat virtual community members as partners in promotion and distribution. Virtual communities of consumption have implicated their own identities profoundly with the consumption object and its symbols. By linking marketing information to symbols that provide meaning and gather attention in virtual consumption communities, can provoke insiders and devotees to share what it is that makes consumption especially special to them. The more marketers can provide members with the meaning and sense of purpose that is related to their shared consumption identities, the more those consumers would become and remain loyal.

Kozinets saw pay-for-attention marketing as a transitional strategy that could bridge one-to-one approach and communal online marketing by considering the active nature of online consumption. In practice this could mean offering incentives such as games, contests and prizes in exchange for a person’s permission to tell them more about a product/service. Traditional marketing trend emerging in the digital economy already in 1990s was also the importance of networks and that networks are often created by giving things away.  Even though morally and socially biased, giving things away could also be seen as building loyalty.

Conclusions and critique

The question at hand was - and still is - how to approach the unstable marketing medium that we know as social media today. Virtual communities have truly become mainstream in Western countries, and an important arena where people interact as citizens, community members and as consumers. What makes Kozinets views most outdated is the diverging and expanding landscape of these communities. Where Kozinets doubted that online interactions would replace physical encounters or information from traditional media, in reality being online is changing consumption patterns as well as the ways we keep in touch with our friends and family. Online presence is becoming everyday complement rather than occasional supplement.

On the other hand, it is still true that certain mediums and segments of virtual consumption communities are more suitable for marketing than others. Whereas the fleeting nature of interaction was seen as prevalent community feature in the 1990s, the name of the game today is increasing velocity of information. Even though Internet provides an archive of marketing information of online consumers, the question is whether the data is up-to-date, relevant and popular. The world of virtual communities is so extensive and complex today that companies find themselves in trouble trying to focus and target their (potential) customers. Without social media metrics is can be hard to follow the crucial flow of customer interests.

Another dimension lacking from the analysis was group dynamics. A community cannot just be the sum of its individuals as social interaction arouses experiences that are not only personal. Thus you can distinguish different layers of interaction: personal, interpersonal, inter-groups and between groups and the mass. As the goal is to provide symbols and meanings to which the consumer relates to, all these layers play important role in how meaning develops within consumer’s life. Therefore the level of sociality must be measured also with other criterion in addition to the amount of interaction. Also, the changing nature of communities involves other power dynamics than the ones deriving from opinion leaders and dispersing.

As for the approaching methods, many of Kozinets suggestions can still be seen in today’s online communities. Social media can be an opting channel if you just know how to use it. A fresh example of opting consumers to share their brand meanings could be Marimekko’s Minun Marimekkoni –campaign for Indiedays blog platform. The paying-for-attention, on the other hand, is coming to its end in brassy online advertizing, but otherwise still commonly used in polls and competitions. The network focus is obvious but taking another course from giving things away as the Virtual Wild West is taking steps to social and legal codes of conduct.

Discussed methods by Kozinets are really for targeting and segmenting tools, and the analysis should be taken as such. He doesn’t discuss about how to position one’s self between different communities and factions. Nor does he give profound approaching suggestions e.g. by analyzing examples what kind of reactions the proposed means initiate within the communities. Customer segmentation analysis through qualitative data is still called for but should have more broad approach than amount of communication and motivation type. As Kozinets notes, when qualitative and quantitative online information work in concert, it becomes to possible to understand thoroughly how consumers view the products within the entire lived experience.