Post Modernism and Consumer Behavior: Analytical Essay

Introduction

Understanding consumer behavior is important for any organization before launching a product. If the organization failed to analyse how a customer will respond to a particular product, the company will face losses. Consumer behavior is very complex because each consumer has different mind and attitude towards purchase, consumption and disposal of product (Solomon, 2009). Understanding the theories and concepts of consumer behavior helps to market the product or services successfully. Over the years, customer behavior; now people are buying a healthier range of goods, as knowledge about products that were not known many years ago now is well known. Factors like this shift our understanding and trust of goods as we are now more expert as well as law-makers who print the recipes and contents of the ingredients in the food product back to enable customers to be better informed. The standard customer is now watching what heshe eats; he or she is more conscious of and is exposed to trends in consumer behavior. The hypotheses and principles of Customer behavior allow advertisers to maximise their profits and to build effective marketing campaigns. Moreover, both hypotheses provides marketers with knowledge on the consumer’s behavior to spend money, possibly factors that incline them to spend more money on a product, and these two information help to prepare tactics that can be practiced by the marketers for effective promotion of a product (Goessl, 2011).

Post Modernism and Consumer

It is a reality that postmodernism is difficult to evaluate because it tends to be a phenomenon in a number of subjects and fields such as literature, music, art, communications, design, television, fashion, technology and sociology. It's difficult to create it historically and contextually, or it's not clear when postmodernism starts. Postmodernism is so complex an idea or collection of ideas that even the postmodernists themselves are deeply contentious. From the mid-80s on, the word has been regarded as a scholarly field.

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The postmodernism cannot be described. However, it can be defined as a collection of objectively, strategically and rhetorically-orientated activities that use concepts such as distinction, repetition, traceability, simulacra and hyper-reality to destabilize other concepts like existence, identification, past, epistemic security and sense uniqueness. Since World War II, the postmodernist revolution started, in which culture in the perspective of civilization and art became high and low doubtful. A new collection of values for literature were established by the post-modernist literary movement, such as meta-fiction, fable like representation, pastiche, irony and satire, among others. In his essay 'Postmodernism and Consumer Society,' Fredric Jameson talks about the movement and its philosophy.

Postmodernism has been a prominent social theory for nearly 3 decades (Christensen et al, 2005) but postmodernism was not specifically recognised as an important social condition descriptor than it has been since the '90s (Lo 'pez-Bonilla and Lo' pez-Bonilla, 2009). Postmodernism must recognise aspects in which people in contemporary cultures think and behave as consumers (Hirschman and Holbrook 1992; Holt 1997; Thompson 2002). Indeed, because of the interdisciplinary nature of many scholars, by postmodernism allows crossing of theoretical boundaries and offers a less constrained and richer view of customers (Miles 1999).

Five conditions of post-modernism were described in Firat and Vankatech (1993): hyperrealism, fragmentation, development and market reversal, the decent subject, and paradoxical opposites. Van Raaij (1993) applies to these circumstances, pluralism and recognition of disparities as a dominant solution to all relationships. In 1997, Firat and Shultz suggested other post-modern criteria such as transparency and diversity, presenters, recognition of confusion and confusion and value of form and design. The most common conditions were employed and accepted on behalf of the authors and researchers in the postmodern field, as indicated by Firat and Shultz (2001) and Brown (2006).

The core premises in postmodern societies are social science based on consumption (Firat, 1993). As already stated, several academics have recently paid attention to the postmodern approach to consumption (Brown, 1993; Van Raaij, 1993; Firat and Venkatesh, 1993, 1995; Venkatesh, 1990; Baudrillard, 2003). These scientists actually believed that post-modernism could dramatically change the way business activities are practiced in the everyday life of consumers. Sociologist Ritzer (1998: 1) says: 'Postmodern society is more or less synonymous with consumer society.' As examples of such remarks, Ritzer also points out Jameson (1994) and Featherstone (1996). Cova, one of the most influential scholars on postmodernism, has important insights into this topic.

Consumption should not be valued for its use qualities, the functionalities of the goods or the functional specifications of the user, but simply as meaning in terms of sign-values. Thus the supremacy of spectacle and hyper reality modes is emphasized by postmodern audience interactions rather than 'real experience.'

Bordeiou, Class and Consumption

Bordeiou opposes the common concept that the 'taste' (i.e. consumer predilections) he refers to is the product of innate, individualistic human intelligence choices. Bordeiou denies the standard concept of what he terms 'tastes' (i.e. customer preferences). He suggests that this 'Kantian aesthetics' does not understand that preferences are socially conditioned and that consumer preference artifacts reflect a symbiotic hierarchy that the socially dominant establishes and retains, with a view to maintaining their distance from other groups in society. The customer behavior research by Bordeiou is a simple extension of his larger sociology project. Though Bourdieu's study defies a simple description within the confines of Anglo-American sociology (Bordeiou and Wacquant 1992). However, the approach of Bordeiou attempts to step past the conventional (objectivistsubjectivist) dichotomy of British and North American social theory. The so called 'structural agency problem' aims at problematising human actions by questioning how social institutional and structural features interact with human agency (the autonomous human being).

Social classes (what Bordeiou calls 'classes on paper') can be differentiated within the consumption sector. Paper classes aren't true communities because they don't have a clear collective affiliation and don't get organized to combat economic and cultural resources. Paper groups are composed of entities in multidimensional 'capital space' that hold identical roles (i.e., they possess similar amounts and types of capital). Their material and cultural state will also be identical and their conditioning will be similar. This ensures that class members 'have the right to have common provisions and desires.

The above is just one series of examples to equate Bourdieu's approach with the conventional Warnerian social status and market paradigm. The latter explicitly adopts a conventional structural-functional approach to the disparities in consumption between social groups. For Warner and his publicity lovers, different groups clearly have different preferences. The Warner paradigm appears not to aim to understand the complex sociological origins of class attitudes but to define choice behaviment. Bordeiou considers consumer activity, on the other hand, as one representation of a conflict (non Marxist) class with dynamic consequences for cultural hegemony. It was argued after Bordeiou that the choice of customers and aesthetic structures have deep origins in a class hierarchy which the culturally dominant imposes on society. The Kantian notion of 'taste' as a professor of affection that exists in the human intellect itself is an instrument that makes it possible to decide the society's notion of 'right' and 'appropriate' food, clothes, leisure activities, lodging, literature, art etc... By the 'inappropriate' quantity and nature of cultural resources. Unlike Kant, Bordeiou argued that (in any sense) those decisions are the strictly subjective desires of the ruling social classes, which might determine.

Unfortunately, dominated class classes are unknown to the subjective existence of cultural hierarchy, so they are told that cultural and artistic judgments are drawn from some kind of 'special knowledge' In reality, however, the cultural choices of the dominant are the product of a 'comfortable familiarity' and the 'legitimate autodidacticism' advocated by higher learning institutions. In comparison, the well-documented education system class distortions guarantee that the powerful will retain its cultural superiority by restricting access to the means of exploitation for legitimate cultures.

Consumer Identity

Consumer culture is the core role in the later modernist historical phase of the West, whether we are black, white, obese or thin, man or woman, doctor or housewife, European or Australian, people with different identities are clearly consumers in everyday life and consumerism is a rather good idea in the post-modern world. In fact, consumers' culture holds central roles in western modernism. Throughout the years there have been a series of approaches to personality and self-identity from various points of view: psychology, cognitive psychology, anthropology, sociology and philosophy. As Mach (2007) insists that personality is a relational creation, it is a self-image, which is created through a contact phase with others. It is also complex, contextual and enhances by dialogue and the various ways in which people share the meaning of the plurality of symbols, which make up their cultural environment and social ties.

Material culture, literature, traditions and myths all form the cultural patrimony of interaction-minded people, and many other symbolic constructs (including these) partake in the process of building images, serving as the material on which all of these images and boundaries between communities are created. There is not only a matter of constructing abstract identities but also power relationships in building one's self-identity and others» (March 2007, p.54-55) that we need to remember. The process of collective symbolic identity takes the form of maintaining and legitimizing the e among social groups is unequal power balance.

Symbolic personality changes and identity forms result from the balance of power changes. Ardener believes that building representations of individuals and their identity models is an imposition performance (Andener, 1989 in March, 2007). It can give rise to the approval of this identifier. In general, an individual of a community may embrace its identity, as formed in a system of society by its partners, especially when those partners attain a stronger role in a social structure (Ardener, 2007).

In consumer culture, through the use of goods, services and interactions that we formulate and present as collective identities. Goods which signify social identification, but, compared with other identities, it seems more like a market feature in the post-traditional culture. The representations we created on the exterior of our bodies and our living place, identity, became a fundamental means of thinking and recognition. (Slater, 1997) In the aspect Giddens argued that with the introduction of modernity and facial decoration modes or dresses to certain degrees, body look and actions became increasingly important. Our personal impression, on the one hand, manifests our identity, so that we eat those things to better look and sound, an indication that we should take for granted that we set up our identity. Some use weight loss tools to make it look slim; whilst others may go to fitness centers and create their muscles and yoga, and make them healthy. They can use the products of makeup and beauty. 'We prefer these goods over others precisely because they are not impartial, because they are culturally contradictory and also because they vary in our beliefs regarding social organisation and identity.

Finally, by eating people who make 'choices' they leads 'identity crisis' by providing more choices of pictures and choices of different identity and by raising the feeling of social danger to make the correct 'defect option,' consumer culture will increase the person's fear and risk encounters by offering more choices of pictures and choices of different identities. For the two preceding points, then, identity 'connects,' for the second, the consumer culture poses the obstacle to the building of an identity.

Conclusion

In all stages, the focus principles, methodology and goals of market research embody both the field's previous growth and developments in the broader science world. However, the centre of the field remained unchanged despite changing trends—including to consider human motives, thinking processes, or perceptions when consuming commodities, services, knowledge, and other items and to use them in designing approaches that strengthen both marketing campaigns for businesses and consumer goods for individuals and groups. It is important to look back and note the perspectives that this area has created in the midst of the excitement induced by emerging technology, social movements and customer experiences. The combination of recent insights and new research of these previous results would improve the field's knowledge of customer behavior.

References

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9. Ma, T.L. Preliminary Analysis on the Consumer Behaviors in Group Purchase Website under O2O Mode and Strategies [J]. Modern Business, 2014, 34: 56-57.
10. Ma, Z.P. Research on the Brand Marketing Strategy Based on Consumer Behavior--taking the mobile phone industry as an example [J]. Chinese Collective Economy, 2014, 15: 67-68.
11. Wang, T.L., Zhang, J.Y., Niu, Y.F. Strategy of Improving the Dynamic Competitiveness for Enterprises Based on Network Consumers Behavior [J]. Business Ara, 2014, 13: 56-58.
12. Liu, T.M., Sun, J. Research on the Factors that Affect the Behavior of B2C Electronic Business Consumers [J]. Chinese Market, 2014, 10: 67-68.
13. Chen, J. Research Progress and Prospect of Chinese Consumers Behavior [J]. Chinese Market, 2014, 27: 30-32