Changing lifestyles in the age of fear: projective analysis of social insecurity and consumption patterns

Abstract

Research Question This paper analyzes the influence of social insecurity as specific source of stress, consumer reactions to such influence, and changes in consumption behavior. There is a need to understand how consumers react to social insecurity given the current socio-economic landscape. Research on how social insecurity influences consumer behavior has received little attention with the exception of some studies analyzing the influence of post-traumatic stress disorder originated from terrorist attacks (Ruvio et al. 2014; Somer and Ruvio 2014) and natural disasters (Baker et al. 2007). While the occurrence of such unexpected events are of relatively low probability, recurrent criminal events as passer robbery, transport robbery, burglary, and extortion provoke a heightened sense of personal vulnerability. Mexico has been ranked in the place 142 in the Global Peace Index (IEP, 2015) due to "urban gang violence" and domestic conflicts related to drug traffic. During 2013, 33.9% of Mexican households had at least one family member who was a victim of crime being passer robbery, extortion, and burglary the most prevalent (INEGI, 2015). The previous makes Mexico an interesting case study to analyze social insecurity and consumption patterns. Method and Data We used ZMET methodology (Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique) a qualitative research methodology, created by Gerald Zaltman (1997), and designed to construct mental patterns of thoughts and emotions. It uses different images and metaphors referring the consumer's memories and representations, constructing patterns of the consumer's thinking and behavior. Consumers select images and control the stimuli in a guided conversation in-depth personal interviews. The ZMET methodology was gathered in the Metropolitan area of Mexico City, interviewees generated the methodology materials in Spanish. The resulting codification and classification of constructs as well as hierarchy map, and consensus model were translated to English following the suggestion of (Churchill Jr, 1979) which involves translating from one language to another to assure consistency of terms. For the application of the technique, a judgement sample of 32 observations: 27 students, 5 employees, 15 men and 17 women (age range: 19-55 years; age mean: 22.5 years). The overall sample belongs to socio-economical levels A/B (monthly household income: more than U.S.$5,000.00), C+ (monthly household income: between U.S.$2,058.00 and U.S.$4,999.99) according to AMAI (2005). The sample individuals were filtered out on the basis of exposure to at least one direct or indirect personal experience related to social insecurity. Summary of Findings The model involves thoughts and feelings generated by social insecurity dimensions. Following Zaltman (1997), we considered as relevant only those feelings and thought which received at least four mentions from interviewees. To read and interpret the consensus map, we follow the rule of thumb suggested by Christensen and Olson (2002): The first step is to locate the most highly connected constructs that are linked to other constructs. The central constructs: hazardous city, fear sources, fear, changes in lifestyle, and lack of Government job. The most mentioned overall goal among the thematic segments are feelings of insecurity and changes in lifestyle. The consensus map shows that feelings of insecurity are linked to fear and sources of fear as well as changes in lifestyle which, in turn, are associated with stop wearing luxury brands and stop using conspicuous gadgets. Look for missing constructs. Looking for concepts or ideas which are not explicitly showed in the consensus map. We noticed that use of guns weather for self-defense or aggression were not mentioned during the interviews. The underlying assumption is that there may be relationships between social insecurity and guns but we could not find any construct grounded on empirical data. Key Contributions Results show four themes related to social insecurity: Fear, hazardous city, lack of government job, changing lifestyles. The study contributes to literature in that it extends the domain of consumer vulnerability (Baker et al. 2005) by adding deep consumers' emotions as fear as a consumer response to vulnerability. The qualitative methodology analyses deep feelings and thoughts derived from metaphoric thinking and generates a map of relationships among big themes and constructs. While this methodology helps analyze functional and psychosocial consequences from the perception of social insecurity attributes, it may limit the broad actionability of marketing tactics and plans. However, there is opportunity to evaluate marketing tactics as development of communication and advertising campaigns as well as product improvements. This study has to be considered as a first approach to an under researched field that relates social insecurity with consumption patterns. Given the high dependability of qualitative research upon the researcher, there is a need to deploy measures to raise reliability levels. Triangulation is a technique used to confirm the findings of a study by analyzing a similar sample of individuals in a similar social context. For this reason, further research needs to complete a confirmatory study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]