What about the consumer culture? As we agreed that the definitions are essential for establishing the base for strategies, let’s focus on another definition of culture this time to approach this question. Concerning the communal form, culture is defined as
the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group
In consideration of this definition, we may tend to assume that they do, however, groups do not have boundaries. Individual members manipulate group boundaries with preferences in diverse fields. Similarly, consumers do not have fixed identities to be included in particular groups. In other words, we can not assume that a consistent and fixed idealization of a particular group will help us to define our “target group” unless we are fine with moving targets.
That is why the procedure for uncovering the actual perspective of the people we aim at is crucial. We should not underestimate human thinking. Cost and time effectiveness in a sample of a larger population should not be our only goal. The surface we scan by surveys will surely provide us an overall understanding. However, if we do not go in deep, we can be sure that we take the risk of the data gathered being temporary. Besides, with the lack of actual human interaction or the cognitive dissonance caused by surveys our way to reliable data will be blocked.
As PUHU we believe that listening with insight is the basic procedure to understand. Let us listen…