Social values are central to people’s lives, guiding behaviors, and judgments, and defining who we are. This book advances understanding of consumer social values and their roles in the global marketplace by refining and directing existing knowledge of consumer behaviors. With a diverse set of contributors from different parts of the world, this engaging collection provides a unique examination of social values through cross-cultural research. It incorporates input from researchers with varying academic backgrounds from marketing to psychology and philosophy, and also focuses on a range of methodological approaches including surveys, ethnography, interviews, semantic analysis, and neuroscience. The book introduces innovative concepts and provides comprehensive coverage of several specialized areas, to offer an important contribution to values research and discussion. Key topics include values and choice; means-end chains; relations among goals; motives; religion and personality; value measurement and values related to specific services and industries. Consumer Social Values is an essential resource for scholars, students, and practitioners of consumer psychology and marketing communications.

Social values are central to people’s lives, guiding behaviors, and judgments, and defining who we are. This book advances understanding of consumer social values and their roles in the global marketplace by refining and directing existing knowledge of consumer behaviors. With a diverse set of contributors from different parts of the world, this engaging collection provides a unique examination of social values through cross-cultural research. It incorporates input from researchers with varying academic backgrounds from marketing to psychology and philosophy, and also focuses on a range of methodological approaches including surveys, ethnography, interviews, semantic analysis, and neuroscience. The book introduces innovative concepts and provides comprehensive coverage of several specialized areas, to offer an important contribution to values research and discussion. Key topics include values and choice; means-end chains; relations among goals; motives; religion and personality; value measurement and values related to specific services and industries. Consumer Social Values is an essential resource for scholars, students, and practitioners of consumer psychology and marketing communications.

This book challenges existing stereotypes about the 'consumer as chooser'. It shows how we must develop a more sophisticated understanding of consumers, examining their place and role as users of public services. The analysis shows that there are many different 'faces' of the consumer and that it is not easy to categorise users in particular environments. Drawing on empirical research, The consumer in public services critiques established assumptions surrounding citizenship and consumption. Choice may grab the policy headlines but other essential values are revealed as important throughout the book. One issue concerns the 'subjects' of consumerism, or who it is that presents themselves when they come to use public services. Another concerns consumer 'mechanisms', or the ways that public services try to relate to these people. Bringing these issues together for the first time, with cutting-edge contributions from a range of leading researchers, the message is that today's public services must learn to cope with a differentiated public. This book will be of interest to scholars and students in the fields of social policy and public administration. It will also appeal to policy-makers leading 'user-focused' public service reforms, as well as those responsible for implementing such reforms at the frontline of modern public services.

Focusing on a range of advertising formats, this book provides international state-of-the-art research inter alia on the fast evolving and increasingly complex advertising landscape that raises a number of challenges for advertisers. Further research is needed to guide choices regarding ad content and execution, media placement, social networks, and campaign effectiveness. Advances in Advertising Research are published by the European Advertising Academy (EAA). This volume is a selective collection of research presented at the 14th International Conference in Advertising (ICORIA), which was held in London (UK) in July 2015. The conference gathered more than 150 participants from various countries from nearly all continents, including Europe, North and South America, Asia, and Australia.

Substantial progress has been made in the conceptualization of values within psychology. The importance of values is also acknowledged in marketing, and companies use values to describe the core associations of their brand. Yet despite this, the values concept has received limited attention in marketing theory. The Influence of Values on Consumer Behaviour aims to bridge the gap between the conceptual progress of values in psychology, and the current practice in marketing and branding literature. It proposes the ‘Value Compass’, a comprehensive value system that is cross-culturally applicable to consumer behaviour and brand choice. The values concept is used in psychology to identify the motivations underlying behaviour, a concept that marketers have borrowed to define brand values. This has led to conceptual confusion. Whereas in psychology the values system is perceived as an integrated structure, in marketing, values are treated as abstract motivations that give importance to the benefits of consumption. Attention in marketing has shifted away from brand values toward brand personality, a set of human characteristics associated with a brand. Despite its popularity, brand personality has limitations in explaining consumer behaviour, while the potential merits of a brand values concept have remained largely unexplored. The book presents a meaningful alternative to the brand personality concept and promotes the benefits of using the Value Compass for assessing the effects of brand values and personal values on consumer choice. As such, it will be essential reading for academics and postgraduate students in the fields of marketing, consumer psychology, branding, consumer choice behaviour and business studies.

This book showcases papers presented at the annual Advertising and Consumer Psychology Conference. The contributors -- active scholars with both practitioner and academic backgrounds -- share an interest in the general area of psychographics, values, and lifestyle in advertising. The interdisciplinary and international mix of authors bring a diverse perspective to this volume, which is divided into four nonorthogonal sections. The first section deals with theoretical and conceptual issues in advertising research, while the second section presents chapters devoted to improving methodology. The final two sections illustrate how value, lifestyle, and psychographic research have been used to understand differences among people. The first of these final two sections emphasizes differences among people at different times (commonly called trend research), and the second emphasizes differences among people across national boundaries. Collectively, these chapters illustrate how practical state-of-the-art research in values, lifestyles, and psychographics can be. Thoughtful consideration of values, lifestyles, and psychographics as they are manifested in quality research can improve advertising and marketing practice, and can help the business community deliver products and services that are more in line with consumers' needs.