CRiAC Research
Research in the centre addresses an agenda composed of three themes:
Theme 1: Individual Differences and the Effectiveness of Advertising
This is initially being explored through two sub-themes:
The Processing of Advertising and its Influence on Consumer Behaviour
This draws upon the expertise of the researchers in marketing and psychology (Brett Martin, Bas Verplanken) to examine how consumers make sense of advertising information and how this processing influences their responses. Thus, this sub-theme contributes to the twin fields of advertising and consumer research. The interdisciplinary research of this sub theme provides a more contextualized view of the consumer and offer both scholarly quality and public policy impact.
The Interaction Between Emotional Content in Advertising and Brain Activity
Robert Heath is developing a proposal for an EPSRC-funded research study, in conjunction with Gemma Calvert, Reader in the Department of Psychology. The proposal, which follows on from his PhD research, will utilise fMRI scanning to investigate the interaction between emotional content in advertising and brain activity.
Theme 2: Socio-Cultural Consumption Practices and Brands
This is initially being explored through two sub-themes:
Symbolic Brands and the Performance of Identity
Recent social and cultural theory has paid much attention to the ‘aestheticization of social life’, because it is widely assumed that the techniques involved in the performance of self-identity concern aesthetic or cultural practices and that these performative aspects of the self increasingly constitute cultural resources. This will explore authentic and inauthentic identity performance through the dynamics of symbolic brand communities amongst teenagers and their consumption of fashion brands (Richard Elliott).
Fashion Clothing Decisions and Adolescent Girls’ Small Friendship Groups.
An ethnographic application of Group Socialisation Theory to explore the extent to which peer groups are the most influential agents in adolescents’ attitudes and behaviour in relation to the consumption of fashion brands. It focuses on how adolescent girls gather information, form attitudes and judgments regarding fashion clothing, how they make their consumption decisions, and how shopping for fashion fits into their broader social lives (Richard Elliott).
Theme 3: Critical Approaches to Consumer Empowerment
This theme addresses the issues of consumer disadvantage, consumer marginalisation and consumer resistance through empirical studies and draws on the Critical Marketing Network established through the ESRC seminar series which involved two members of the group (Avi Shankar, Richard Elliott).
Sub-theme:
The Marketisation of the 4th World: Art, Cultural Identity and Emancipatory
Politics
With the advent of the critical turn in marketing an increasing emphasis is
emerging that highlights the negative consequences of a market-based
consuming society. These issues are undeniably pressing, but their
totalizing effect can suggest that the creation of 'producers', 'consumers'
and 'markets' is inevitably deleterious. The purpose of this project is to
investigate the positive benefits that the creation of markets can have for
the marginalized and oppressed. For the indigenous peoples of Australia -
more commonly known as Aborigines - the benefits of a market in their
cultural artefacts are not simply economic but are more importantly
political too. The aim of this research is to trace how the development of a
market in Aboriginal art helped to contribute to the construction of an
Aboriginal cultural identity and the concomitant benefits of political
recognition and political rights that led ultimately to the real prize, the
return of ancestral lands.
Further sub-themes under development include:
One area of growing interest in marketing is the impact that stigmas play in consumers' perceptions and behaviour.
Stigmatisation theory has been successfully applied in public health and social marketing contexts (Veer), such as the impact that stigmas have on obese consumers' decisions to lose weight and has provided significant insight into the underlying psychological antecedents of both conscious and unconscious behaviour.
Vulnerable consumers are regarded as those who are particularly susceptible to marketing pressures, such as uneducated, young or desperate consumer groups in society. An evolving field in consumer research is the illegal and immoral use of marketing to specifically target these vulnerable consumers. For example, the way in which marketers use deceptive techniques, such as stealth marketing, to target uneducated consumers.
Similarly, the use of 'puffery' in advertising claims towards desperate consumers, such as those suffering from terminal diseases, or the use of stealth marketing to unconsciously encourage behaviour or actions that a consumer would not normally engage in. Members of the group are engaging with this topic as a means of understanding its effects in order to provide contributions to both academia and public policy (Caroline Strong, Ekant Veer).