Life Stories and Marketing: Application on Child Socialization of Socially Responsible Consumption: An Abstract

Abstract

The purpose of our research is intended to model the socialization process to socially responsible consumption in determining when, how, and by whom the values, norms, knowledge, and skills identified must be instilled to maximize the chances to see a child adopt these behaviors once grown up. To achieve this goal, it is illusory to mobilize successive studies over several years to understand this futures socialization’s process. Indeed, we are not in a process that one would have initiated and would follow the evolution (as a doctor chronologically analyzes the reactions of a patient subject to a new treatment protocol). As to follow individuals’ real life over 15 years, it would involve, additional to the problem of length, to work on a large initial sample because, over the steps, many people inevitably would lead to alternative paths. In fact, only retrospective studies—not prospective—can help to understand the articulation of a complex process stretches such a long time. We have therefore mobilized the method of life stories. From the Chicago School of sociology in the 1920s, it has proved particularly suitable for marketing research (Patriotta 2003; Boje 2001; Jameson 2000) and yet much less used than other qualitative approaches. This type of study involves the analysis and understanding of situations from the lived experience of individuals to understand the inner workings of the studying object, emphasis on “the concepts emerging from data, on ideas that sprout as material accumulates” (Yelle 1997, p.36) and, in the end, model this one. The knowledge that results does not exclude the reality but position it in the complex and dynamic relationships between the person and the environment (Pineau and Legrand 1993). Through long interviews with responsible adult consumers - one hour thirty minutes on average – and multiple – everyone is met 3 times – allowing the narrator to learn about the story of his own life, the method of life stories allows us to back to their childhood and search in depth their socialization to the CSR. Preliminary results suggest that the basis of anchored predispositions (values, norms, knowledge, skills) to adulthood comes from all those who have accompanied the child in its development, in a formalized way or by an opportunistic factors of lived situations.