Culture is the most all-encompassing aspect of our social environment. It has been defined as “a complex of values, ideas, attitudes, and other meaningful symbols cre­ated by f human beings] to shape human behavior and the artifacts of that behavior as they are transmitted from one generation to the next.”⁹ As such, culture is the basic determinant of much of our decision-making and buying behavior. It has a lot to do with why some people prefer Lay’s Potato Chips and others prefer Ruffles.

Each of us belongs to several cultural groups . We are also mem­bers of smaller groups, subcultures within the larger society. These often reflect geo­graphic, religious, or ethnic differences. For example, there are regional differences in taste for beer: New Yorkers seem to prefer a somewhat bitter beer, Californians like a lighter beer, and Texans prefer their beer chilled to 32 degrees.

Frito-Lay spends a great deal of time tailoring products and their distribution to the preferences of different regional subcultures. Vinegar-flavored chips sell in the Northeast, mesquite-flavored chips sell in the Southwest, and s our cream-flavored chips sell in the Midwest. This marketing approach might be viewed as simple oppor­tunism—if a discrete regional market can be developed through regional product de­velopment and marketing, Frito-Lay can make more money and protect its market position better. But it also can be put into the context of the movement toward more customer-oriented marketing and management, a move that is beginning to change everything from manufacturing quality to customer service—and is bringing the cus­tomer into the loop earlier in the product development and planning process so that more focused offerings are now practical, even for behemoths such as Frito-Lay and its parent, PepsiCo.

Taken one step further, marketers can focus on subcultures as small as the neighborhood around a single grocery store. Firms such as Frito-Lay are now experimenting with customized product selections and in-store displays and promotions based on careful analysis of a store’s neighborhood. The detailed data from scanners at checkout give companies the ability to see whether their experiments work. Kraft also studies the purchases of individual households in search of interesting patterns. The data reveal “clusters of brands that are bought by segments of households,” according to Lorraine Scarpa, senior vice president of marketing ser­vices at Kraft General Foods.¹’ It also reveals other patterns—some likely the result of micro-cultures that can be reflected in decisions about which Kraft products to stock in which neighborhoods. Scarpa explains,

In a group of 90 Kroger stores in Columbus, we looked at SKU [stock-keeping-unit] movement over a one-month period. The average stores stocked about 23,000 SKUs. 6,700 of those SKUs sold on a given day. 13,600 sold in a week. 17,500 sold in a month and 5,500 did not sell even once in 30 days! Are they the same 5,500 across the 90 stores? No! But a lot are, and when you manage your stores locally, you don’t care that much—you just want them off your shelf.

We’ve all noted the variations in what different grocery stores stock—some­times it’s a source of frustration that you can’t find something that your local store stocks when you visit a store in a different town. Such variations might seem acciden­tal to the consumer, but in fact they reflect the careful analysis of store-specific data.

The research firm Market Metrics in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, gathers data that include economic, social, and ethnic profiles; traffic patterns; per capita food expenditures; and information on store sales for each of 3,000 supermarkets.’³ Now marketers can take the kind of personality profiles that Tracy-Locke developed for Frito-Lay and match them with individual stores. For example, Coors Light Beer is targeted toward 21- to 34-year-old, male, middle to upper income, suburban or urban heads of households who belong to a health club, buy rock music, travel hy plane, give parties and cookouts, rent videos, and are heavy television sports view­ers.’⁴ This description is so specific that you could probably pick them out just by their clothing, as Howard Davis can with his potato chip profiles. The combination of this profile and store-specific information allows Coors to identify, for example, the three top stores for Coors Light: the Food Emporiums at 1498 York Avenue and First & 72nd Street, and the Gristedes Supermarket at 350 East 86th, all in New York City. This is a subculture of importance to Coors, but one that sociologists might find a bit odd because it is identified primarily by its preference for a specific brand of beer. From a marketing perspective, however, it is just as legitimate as any regional or ethnic subculture—and probably much more useful.

The Nature of Culture

Culture develops because we live together with other people in a society. Living with others creates the need to determine what behaviors are acceptable to all members of the group. To meet this need, groups develop rules of conduct, or norms. Norms are situation specific—they inform the members of a particular cultural group what be­havior is correct in certain situations. For the Ruffles customer Howard Davis pegged in the article’s opening quote, for example, wearing boat shoes with blue socks, khaki pants, and a red tie is no doubt accepted within his reference group or subcul­ture, although it might be considered odd by other groups.

Underlying cultural norms are values, the deeply held beliefs and attitudes of the members of a particular society. Values give direction to the development of norms.

The process by which an individual learns cultural values and norms is called socializa­tion or enculturation. We absorb cultural values, ideas, and attitudes primarily from our families, but also through the educational process and religious training. In later years, our behavior is refined by the influence of friends, peers, and the culture at large—everything from fine art to television—and even by marketers as they present ideas through their promotional campaigns. The constellation of attitudes and prefer­ences that go into one of Frito-Lay’s brand-user profiles reflects a common history of family, educational, and social influences. This constellation has a certain stability-­they are a real reflection of our culture as experienced by a certain group of people.
Cultural norms are a shifting landscape. Today, the Ruffles consumer may wear blue socks with his boat shoes; tomorrow, boat shoes may be out and loafers in. How­ever, the underlying values are more constant. The Ruffles eater’s attitudes toward the importance of work, for example, are unlikely to change dramatically when he changes his shoes.

Although these values are more constant, they are not unchanging. When cul­tural values do shift, the impact on society, and on businesses in particular, is dra­matic. And values do shift, only it happens so gradually that many marketers fail to take notice. One way to tune into the slower pace of value shifts is to track values by decade, rather than by year. What values were dominant in the 1960s? How do they compare with those of the 1950s—or with today’s values? When looked at that way, values certainly do change.

Take Americans’ attitudes toward luxury living and conspicuous consumption. It seems like a love of luxury alternates with a more frugal love of the simple life from decade to decade. And this swing of the value pendulum is reflected in a host of purchase preferences.

Two snapshots of U.S. consumers serve to illustrate this point. In the first snap­shot, taken at the beginning of the 1990s, we see a shift away from luxury and self-indulgence as consumers begin to embrace the “simple life.” Time magazine reported in the spring of 1991 that the United States was shifting toward simpler, home and family-oriented values; Time’s shopping list for the new simple life of the 1990s illus­trates the impact of these values on marketers:

Macaroni and cheese. Timex watches. Volunteer work. Insulated underwear. Savings ac­counts. Roseanne. Domestic beer. Local activism. Sleds. Pajamas. Sentimental movies. Primary colors. Mixed-breed dogs. Bicycles. Cloth diapers. Shopping at Wal-Mart. Small-town ways. Iceberg lettuce. Family reunions. Board games. Hang-it-yourself wall­paper. Push-it-yourself lawn mowers. Silly Putty.

Behind these commercial symbols were a fundamental and significant change in values and lifestyles. Thousands of “dropout” managers such as Peter Lynch, who left his star position at Fidelity for family life, and Barry Blake, who left an executive po­sition in the liquor industry to run an apple winery in Vermont, gave up the corporate chase of the 1980s for a more meaningful lifestyle.

What did this value shift mean for marketers? The researchers at ad agency Foote, Cone & Belding did not know, but they were determined to find out. To do so, they have moved undercover investigators into a small town in the Midwest (they won’t say which one) to observe the simple life firsthand. According to one report, the re­searchers “are eavesdropping at school-board meetings, at the local cafe, and even at funerals (they say eulogies really sum up the town’s values).”¹⁶ According to Dan Fox, the project’s director, they learned that “Everything that is important seems to be tied directly to children. And helping one’s neighbors is not just something do-gooders do. It’s all-pervasive.”

But now let’s flash-forward to another snapshot, this one taken in 1997. It re­veals that the number of U.S. households with a net worth of at least $1 million rose 118 percent from 1992 to 1996.17 There are more wealthy people every day, and they are getting richer. And these people like their luxuries. An annual survey of these rich consumers called the Mendelson Affluent Survey (by Mendelson Media Re­search, Inc.) finds that rich consumers are living the good life. They are far more likely to participate in activities such as tennis, sailing, and skiing, and to buy the ex­pensive equipment these sports require. Other reports indicate that the BMW Z3 roadster, a flashy $35,000 two-seater nobody would describe as practical, is chocking up record sales.

Another study (by the NDP Group, Inc. of Port Washington, New York) finds that growth in spending by people with incomes of $70,000 or more outpaces spend­ing growth in the rest of the U.S. population. In other words, not only are the rich getting richer, but they are also spending more each year.

Perhaps this is why some marketers declared that “status was back” by the mid­1990s. It seemed that the quest for the simple life was giving way again to the quest for the “finer” things of life. A Brandweek article declared that, “After years of re­treat, affluent consumers are coming out of hibernation to indulge their appetites for the finer things.”

To kick off this seemingly major value shift, Fortune magazine did a story on “The Return of Luxury,” citing rising sales for products like Dior Perfume (at $200 per ounce) and a Louis Vuitton Attaché case that retails for $1,660.

Is the simple life now out again, and luxury back? Luxury products continue to sell well. But so do simple-life goods and services. One hypothesis is that the values in question are both on the upswing in the United States because of a growing eco­nomic disparity between the rich and the rest of us. If you take out the wealthy from demographic statistics, you find that household income for everybody else in the United States tends to stay steady or even fall from year to year. And if you are trying to raise a family on a falling income, you are more likely to see the appeal of a back-to-basics ethic than to pursue conspicuous consumption.

On the other hand, the pursuit of luxury may prove to be more democratic than we now think. It took more than millionaires to fuel the rapid growth of the gourmet coffee market, for example. Perhaps the free-spending ways of the wealthy are rub­bing off on everybody else, and the United States will re-embrace luxury during the first decade of the new century. An alternative hypothesis is that the simple 1990s are out and a pursuit of luxury will dominate consumer spending in the next decade.

Which hypothesis is right? Such are the questions marketers must ask themselves in order to anticipate consumer tastes. We aren’t sure, but we have a suspicion that the second hypothesis is the best bet—that the pursuit of luxury will gain in popularity among consumers, regardless of their incomes. Why? Well, it’s that mysterious Midwestern town. You see, while we can’t swear to it, we suspect the researchers from Foote, Cone & Belding might have been studying the denizens of Wichita, Kansas. (If not, surely it was a town a lot like this one.) And if you haven’t visited Wichita lately, you might not realize that it was featured in a 1997 USA Today cover story headlined, “Cigar-and-martini town echoes nation’s prosperity.”

It seems that ordinary folk are packing into Mort’s Cigar Bar nightly (it wasn’t even in business back in 1991), and buying BMW roadsters from the local dealer at an amazing clip. Prosperity seems to have seized this dusty old town by the neck and tossed it into a new era. Perhaps the rest of the nation will follow.

Another, more long-term and predictable value shift of importance to U.S. busi­nesses is the change in sexual mores. Society definitely views sex differently today than it did 40 years ago. Whereas in the past, sex was viewed primarily in terms of repro­duction, this aspect of sex is given less attention today, and attitudes toward sexuality have become far less strict. Sexual values have changed in part as a result of birth con­trol products, which, incidentally, are an excellent example of how products can and do drive even the most fundamental of cultural values. In the marketplace, these changes are reflected both in the goods and services offered, and in the promotional activities related to them. Few would argue that marketers have not kept pace with these changes in cultural values. Some marketers have used subtle sexual overtones to their advertising, such as the appeal, “All my men wear English Leather—or nothing at all.” Other marketers test the outer limits of the U.S. value system: The highly suggestive and controversial Obsession perfume ads are examples. But these ads are probably not popular in Foote, Cone & Belding’s secret Midwestern village. It will be interesting to see what impact the emerging constellation of simple-life values will have on the use of sex in advertising during the next decade.

In some cultures, the use of sex in advertising is more blatant. In Brazil, risqué advertising is the norm: In commercials for Playboy shampoo, a young couple is shown in bed, whereas another television ad shows two women talking about why people think they are homosexuals. In Japan, sexy ads are commonplace. Only three unwritten taboos exist: no frontal nudity, no depiction of sexual acts, and no advertis­ing using sexual themes during the hours that children watch television. In Sweden, frontal nudity in ads is not only acceptable, but common. Yet the Swedish govern­ment, which distills and sells vodka nationwide, bans any form of advertising of hard liquor. In sharp contrast, in Malaysia, ads cannot show bare shoulders or armpits on female models, or touching, kissing, sexy clothing—or even blue jeans. Although the logic of cultural values sometimes escapes marketers, we must acknowledge the val­ues nonetheless.

You Might Also Be Interested in Reading

• Nokia X3 Touch and Type phone
• Mobilink Milestone smartphone
• Warid Jhatpat Balance – Win Free Balance
• Sony Ericsson XPERIA X2
• Why there is a dot(.) on 5 key of every cellphone?
• FIA Raids on People Selling Mobile Jammers Illegally
• Pakistan to Hit 22 Million Internet Users by 2013
• The first “Online Drug Information System” in Pakistan
• Ufone Background Music Service
• Telenor Djuice Daily Sms Bundle

1. Initiator—The person who first recognizes an unsatisfied want or need.
2. Influencer—The individual who provides information about how the want or need may be satisfied.
3. Decider—The person who finally chooses an alternative that will satisfy the want or need.
4. Buyer—The purchaser of the product.
5. Consumer—The user of the product.
6. Evaluator—The individual who provides feedback on the chosen product’s ability to satisfy.

Sometimes all these roles are filled by one person; at other times, different people enter the picture at each stage in the exchange process. Marketers must identify all the important people in any given purchase situation. (By the way, rather than trying to memorize terms such as these, try to use them. For example, think of cases in which you play each of these roles as consumers. You will find you have become familiar with the terms and remember them painlessly as a result. Now if you could only figure out how to create this kind of involvement among readers or viewers of your company’s advertising!)

Understanding that modern-day mothers increasingly are working outside the home rather than in it, General Foods, a subsidiary of Philip Morris Company, is di­recting more of its marketing of food products toward children. A marketing manager told The Wall Street Journal, because “kids have more and more influence over food purchases, we felt we had to market increasingly toward children. In one year’s time, the proportion of Kool-Aid’s advertising devoted to children jumped 200 percent. In addition to the time-honored roles of initiating, influencing, and evaluating, children are taking an increasing role in buying.

A kid-oriented promotion from H.J. Heinz Co., the ketchup makers, illustrates the incredible power children have gained over household purchases in the last decade. Their research showed that children are now dominating purchase decisions for their products, so they decided to reach out to children and increase their in­volvement with the company’s Heinz Ketchup brand. Here’s what they did. Heinz sponsored a contest in which children submitted designs for product labels. The con­test was announced through print ads in magazines that used the headline, “Hey kids, wanna be famous?” Heinz also sent posters announcing the contest to art instructors at U.S. schools. The response? Approximately 60,000 children sent in submissions, and some now appear on Heinz products.

You Might Also Be Interested in Reading

• Warid My Virtual Office – Access Voice Mail, Fax and Email from mobile phone or internet
• Telenor djuice International Pakka Dost
• Ufone Daily MMS Package
• Zong’s Website Gets Redesigned
• PTCL Prolongs Telephone Bill Payment Date
• Indian Movies in Pakistani Cinemas: A Disaster
• Telenor Pakistan receives Rs68 Million from DTAC Thailand for flood relief
• zong 80 Paisa/Default Package
• SBSH PocketWeather v2.3.1 RC4 Build 4785
• Sony bloggie™ Camera

—Abraham II. Maslow

The more you know about the customer the better. You never know when a small fact might lead to a better product.

—R. Stephen Fountaine. vice president of market research.
Kimberly-Clark Corporation

You’re somewhat in the Ruffles camp. You must have confidence to dress that way, so flat chips aren’t for you. You aren’t taking a trip on the wild side, though; not exciting enough for jalapeno-flavored. Maybe on a Friday night you’ll try cheddar to really step out. Bean dip too if you loosen up.

—Howard Davis. chairman of Frito-Lay’s advertising agency,
Tracy-Locke

Imagine this. Your target customer is a female baby boomer, a women of 40 years of age who juggles a management job and family. You have designed a product line just right for her household. And now you have a chance to make the sale, because she is on her lunch break, shopping for a gift for her husband’s birthday.

She has given herself a half-hour today to visit the mall nearest her office build­ing. That’s less than half the 66 minutes spent by visitors to U.S. shopping malls on av­erage. Will she manage to find her way into the right store, right aisle, and right display, in order to find the product you market and select it for purchase? You hope so!

All goes well at first. She notices the appealing window displays and signs outside the store, and turns in to examine the merchandise. Browsing her way down an aisle, she encounters your product display and stops, interested. “Ah, I bet he’d like one of these!” she says to herself, leaning forward to examine a sample. But then something goes terribly wrong. It’s hardly noticeable to the average observer, but more than enough to interrupt your customer’s concentration. What happens is this. Another cus­tomer wanders down the same aisle and, because the aisle is so narrow, accidentally brushes against your target’s rear end. Distracted, your would-be buyer begins to move down the aisle again, looking for other items. Then she glances at her watch, mutters “Darn, I’m going to be late for the staff meeting,” and heads for the door.

No sale. Sorry. Another marketing exchange falls prey to consumer behavior. This particular problem—one of a seemingly infinite number of things that can go wrong—happens to be well studied by Paco Underhill, founder of Envirosell, a New York-based retail consulting firm. In thousands of hours of videotapes of shopper behavior, Underhill has identified a great many facts of relevance to marketers, in­cluding the observation that a woman shopper’s probability of being converted from a browser to a buyer is inversely proportional to the likelihood of her being bumped while examining the merchandise.

How could you have made that sale? Well, you might give more attention to where and how your products are displayed in retail stores. If aisles are narrow and crowded, then perhaps a free-standing island rack or an end-of-aisle display would eliminate what Underhill terms le facteur bousculade. And how about selecting a dis­play location that is to the right of the doorway on the way into the store—since Un­derhill’s research shows shoppers almost always turn right upon entering a store. Oh, but don’t let them display your products too close to the door. If they fall into the shop­per’s decompression zone, the area just inside the door where shoppers slow down and refocus before beginning their shopping, then the displays will probably be ignored.

If demographics and forecasting are all about identifying the customer, consumer behavior is all about understanding that customer. And customer behavior can be re­markably complex, as our brief observations of this lunch-time shopper revealed. In many ways, understanding customer behavior is a far more difficult task than simply identifying your target customers. As the psychologist Abraham Maslow observed, peo­ple practically always desire something. But it takes a great deal of insight to know what they desire, when, and where.

Howard Davis has a clear understanding of chip desires. It comes from hun­dreds of hours of thought and research on the topic. In his lesson-opening quote, he is sizing up a visitor to his office at the ad agency Tracy-Locke based on a quick as­sessment of the man’s clothing and appearance. Clues like boat shoes, khaki pants, red tie, plain blue shirt, navy socks, and a matching plastic pen provide the raw mate­rial for his Sherlock Holmes-style deductions. He thinks he can narrow down the visitor’s preferences to only a few of Frito-Lay’s 85 varieties of corn and potato chips. Is he right? Unfortunately, the journalist who reported this conversation did not say.

But the odds of being right are strongly in Davis’ favor because Tracy-Locke goes to incredible lengths to understand the personalities of each Frito-Lay brand and its users. The agency gets a head start from Frito-Lay, which operates an elaborate labora­tory near Dallas dubbed the Potato Chip Pentagon. Staffed with close to 500 psycholo­gists, chemists, and engineers, the lab studies everything from chip thickness to flavor patterns. For example, researchers have learned that people prefer their chips to break under approximately four pounds of pressure per square inch, and that they do not like the “Frito Breath” and “Dorito Breath” that people have after eating these chips. (Inci­dentally, Frito-Lay is experimenting with ways to reduce this effect.) The reason Frito-Lay invests so much in chip research comes down to a startlingly simple observation of human behavior. As Dennis Heard, senior vice president of technology, explains, “We have to be perfect; after all, no one really needs a potato chip.”

Nonetheless, Howard Davis is determined to find out who wants chips, and which chips they want. To start with, the agency does consumer surveys to find out what peo­ple say they want (Frito-Lay’s research queried a total of 500,000 people in a single year). But for some reason, people rarely tell the truth about their chip passions. Davis explains that “a lot of people who say they feed their families only alfalfa sprouts also eat potato chips.” And careful tests have revealed that consumers actually eat about a third more chips at one sitting than they say they do. (How did they find this out? By giving people pre-measured large bags of chips at a movie theater, then measuring the leftover chips afterward.) Perhaps people are not entirely honest about their chip be­havior because chips are, with all that salt and fat, a somewhat unhealthy indulgence. And chip consumption is essentially a private affair—research shows that 65 percent of all chips are eaten in private.

Thus, Frito-Lay’s survey research, psychographics, and other standard research must be supplemented with creative insight. The insight starts with projective re­search designed to learn more about consumers than they know about themselves. Re­spondents are shown photographs, for example, each depicting different people in different situations. Questions such as “Is this person likely to eat potato chips?” are used to get at underlying attitudes and values. (Some of the results are amusing: Some­one with an umbrella is not likely to eat chips, whereas someone watching TV is very likely to.) Tracy-Locke combines the insights from this qualitative research with the mass of survey research to develop personality profiles, and then prepares videotapes portraying the types of people whom they expect to eat various types of chips. Each of these tapes comprises images collected from modern culture—bits of ads, movies, and television shows. The videos are then kept strictly under wraps, for use only by the agency’s copywriters.

The public will never see these videos, but thanks to the diligence of a Wall Street Journal reporter, we can at least read a quick review of them:

The videos reflect distinct personality differences among eaters of various snacks. Some examples: Lay’s Potato Chips Consumers of these flat chips are seen as “affec­tionate, irresistible, casual and a fun member of the family.” Scenes show bubbling streams, puppies, flowers, a couple exchanging wedding vows, a farmer driving mules and a little girl stroking a cat. The music theme is the soft rock “Little Pink Houses” by John Cougar Mellencamp.

Ruffles Potato Chips Customers are depicted as ‘expressive, aware, confident enough to make a personal statement. Scenes show people getting into a BMW and other new cars, a man opening champagne, wind surfers, and a woman working out in a fashionable outfit. The music is from the fast-paced soundtrack from “Caddyshack.”

These videos are the culmination of an incredible effort to understand the peo­ple who eat chips. We don’t even want to think about how much this effort costs Frito-Lay, and Frito-Lay does not want to reveal how much it costs either. But the results of the research pay handsomely. Americans eat more than six pounds of chips each in the average year, spending more than $4 billion in the process. And Frito-Lay’s share of the market has grown from 25 percent a decade ago to 40 percent at present.6 With pretax profit close to 20 percent of retail sales, it is difficult to visualize the potential earnings from this market! For example, a 1-percent gain in Frito-Lay’s market share would be worth about $8 million in profits. The value of knowing your consumer’s be­havior a little better than the competitors can be incredibly high.

You Might Also Be Interested in Reading

• Telenor Djuice Din Raat (Day Night) Package
• Silent Syrian Hero Bids to Bridge Perceptual Gap About Pakistan
• Sony bloggie™ Camera
• Spb Wireless Monitor (Control Your Traffic, Save Your Money)
• Ufone Awaz Email
• Fizz Weather for Windows Mobile SP.
• WMWifiRouter Share your cellular data/internet connection over wifi
• FBISE Website Hacked – HSSC Part 1 2009 Result is Out
• Ufone Daily MMS Package
• Prepaid Mobile Internet Packages Comparison in Pakistan