Transition As Entire Cultures Transition

What’s been called the Arab Spring exemplifies revolutionary changes in entire cultures. Retailers doing business in these cultures benefit from insights about how the people—especially the adolescents and the family caretakers—transition into new consumer preferences. The adolescents are important because they are ready to push for the new and progressive. The family caretakers are important because they tend to champion the traditional ways in transitioning societies.
     Researchers from Laval University in Canada and University of Sousse in Tunisia began by identifying adolescent girls—future family caretakers—who could be classified as either progressive or conservative. Then the researchers aimed to find what factors caused the girls to hook meanings to product and store brand names.
     Here’s what they found:

• The progressive girls formed brand images most directly based upon their self-esteem. The implication for retailers is to appeal to what the shopper believes will make her feel better about herself. Because what we think of ourselves is determined in part by what others think of us, this also was a factor. However, it was an indirect effect, much weaker than the self-esteem. The progressive girls are relatively independent.
• The conservative girls were directly influenced by what psychologists call “self-monitoring.” This refers to the personality type which pays close attention to what others think of the person. (Yes, “high self-monitoring” does seem a strange name for the trait of paying more attention to others’ views than to one’s self views, but we psychologists need to maintain a certain amount of confusion in order to seem necessary.) With conservative girls, the retailer does best to appeal to whatever the shopper believes will help them fit in well. The conservative girls tune into trends in a transitioning culture to decide what they need to hold out against. But they also trace the paths of change in order to decide when to make monumental instead of incremental changes in order to maintain social acceptability.

     A fine example of the unexpected forms rebellion might take comes from researchers at Bilkent University in Ankara, who investigated why an increasing number of Turkish women were insisting on wearing veils in a secular country where the practice is banned in public buildings.
     The answer? Rebellion. Although the veil is generally seen by Westerners as repressive, many Turkish women adopted it in part as a sign of deviance from the values of their mothers and peers.

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Sell to People Who Want to Rebel