Seminar Response Week 9 – Post-Positivism Filed under ( Education News ) by edy-koerniawan

Seminar Response Week 9 – Post-Positivism : Kozinets (2001) takes an ethnographic approach to articulating the meanings of Star Trek’s culture of consumption. In this article, he looks at consumption meanings in both macrocultural, microcultural, and informal contexts, yielding a data set of “440,000 words of field notes, interviews, and member checks; 260,000 words of artifactual data; and 267 photographs.” Underlining his approach was the notion of articulation theory (Hall 1980), which analyzes linkages between social concepts such as social class and race or cultural belief. Kozinets’s findings help build a theoretical framework of fan-based consumption patterns under a utopian vision. Kozinets also applies Grossberg’s (1992) ‘mattering maps,’ which help to organize self-identity through places, purposes, and moods to “guide the investment of affect.”

The ethnography can be summarized by five major consumption themes: 1) utopian sanctuary; 2) stigma; 3) religion and myth; 4) detachment, affinities, and practices; and, 5) utopian and commercial enterprise. By piecing together the qualitative data with articulation theory and an understanding of mattering maps, Kozinets yields some larger scale findings from what seems like a novel consumer population. However, this post-positivist critique of consumption cultures lends itself well to an empirical study of brands with cult-like followings.

Brands such as Starbucks and Apple have both grown to mythic and religious proportion—the result of their visionary founders’ creations—with brand devotees facing stigma from casual users. Additionally, these brands’ ‘superfans’ assumer higher levels of cynical attitudes when the brands’ founders appear to make business decisions that placate shareholders, rather than appeal to the superfans. As a result of these brands’ cult-like statuses, we should be able to empirically research the general hypothesis that subcultures mediate the interaction between active audience and active media by creating a methodology that looks at cultures of consumption in a positivist context. Both experimental and survey data should test for these effects.

In the first phase of the research design, we use experimental data to determine the effect of cult brands on the propensity to purchase. In this within-subjects experiment, we hypothesize that consumers tend to choose brands with mythical stature when the consumer has a congruent disposition toward the founder’s brand philosophy, controlling for product preference. In the first step of the experiment, the subject will be given brief biographies both on Steve Jobs and on a fictional executive with a similar background for a rival company. After reading the biographies, the subjects would then be given the choice to buy one of two mp3 players, both of which are given equivalent product attributes. In the second step of the experiment, the subject would be shown a commercial promoting a cup of coffee for Starbucks and a commercial promoting a cup of coffee for a rival company. After seeing these commercials, the subjects would then be given the choice to buy one of two cups of coffee, both of which are given equivalent product attributes. Finally, the subjects would be asked to provide open-ended answers to a few questions on self-identity.

In the second phase of the research design, we use survey data to determine the path linkages between mass audience, mass media, and subcultures. Using secondary corporate data on marketing inflows and outflows from both Starbucks and Apple, correlated with primary survey data of the general consumer population, we should be able to determine the differential, mediating role that subcultures play in these consumption behaviors.

In a certain regard, similar types of questions have already been hypothesized in the brand literature on the ‘halo effect’ (Beckwith and Lehmann 1975; Holbrook 1983; Leuthesser, Kohli, and Harich 1995; Bagozzi 1996). This round of empirical testing not only extends the literature on halo effects, but additionally furthers the literature on mass media cultures of consumption as it relates to self-identity. As Kozinets writes: “entertainment content has become a key differentiator in virtually every aspect of the broader consumer economy” (p. 85). However, these cultures of consumption exist beyond just entertainment, filtering mass media culture into all realms of self-identity.