Abstract
The authors examine consumer tensions arising in India’s transitional marketplace. These findings uncover cultural characteristics underlying consumption strategies to address these tensions: the danger and immorality of consumption, the distance and inaccessibility of many newly available products, and the desire for sociality and relationships via consumption. Consumer desires sometimes are in opposition to and sometimes in line with local cultural values and norms such as the frugality ideal and Indian rituals and beliefs. The authors present a typology of resistance strategies, discuss how these impact marketplace transitions, and outline implications for macromarketing. This work enhances the conceptualization of how consumers negotiate tensions as marketplaces globalize and demonstrates how consumers can create their own discourses in this process that in turn can shape the marketplace.
The role and evolution of consumer culture and its interaction with globalization is important for understanding how markets transition as they develop. As Cayla and Eckhardt (2008) note, the marketing field needs to decenter its study of globalization by looking at consumer culture in non-Western contexts, and investigate how consumer culture contributes to expanding the scope of potential identities as societies globalize. For example, Ustuner and Holt (2007) discover that disenfranchised consumers in emerging markets cannot acculturate to their new globalized social reality. They note that this consumer disenfranchisement could represent the reality for the majority of consumers in emerging markets and recommend research in a variety of cultural contexts to determine the nature and level of consumer’s ability to acculturate to globalization.
In response to this, various scholars have offered frameworks to structure the responses that consumers can have to globalization in the marketplace (Alden, Steenkamp, and Batra 2006; Eckhardt and Mahi 2004). Eckhardt and Mahi (2004) argue that consumers will accept certain new market entrants and reject others and outline the cultural considerations which come into play. Alden, Steenkamp, and Batra (2006) suggest that we need to understand the processes and outcomes of consumer responses to global cultural flows (Appadurai 1990). From a macromarketing perspective, understanding these consumer responses is essential because of their role in shaping the macro-level consumer culture which in turn shapes the market system (Layton and Grossbart 2006).
We are interested in understanding consumer tensions in a marketplace that is in transition so that we can gain insight into local market systems. We conduct our research in India, a complex, democratic country with a long history and a large number of cultural, regional, and socioeconomic differences, with a goal of mapping some of these fault lines and shifting ideologies that consumers display as they move from a more traditional, socialist, agrarian economy to a more modern, global, capitalist, and technology-focused one. This allows us to identify traditional or modern consumption patterns and to investigate how social change is affecting marketing systems, which are recommended by Layton and Grossbart (2006) as essential in terms of moving the macro-marketing research agenda forward.
As Bruton (2004) has noted, countries in developing Asia currently face a unique set of macro-level critical issues such as coping with globalization effectively. In the Indian context, this challenge is especially acute, and yet consumerism is on the rise (Bijapurkar 2007; Guha 2007). With rising consumerism, however, emerging markets such as India find that one of the most important tensions is that between the increased desire to consume offerings newly available in the marketplace and the economic ability to do so (Alden, Steenkamp, and Batra 2006). How consumers manage this tension in an emerging market may be different than in a developed market because of heightened contrast between the desire to consume and the inability to consume because of local social norms and incompatibility with local culture (Applbaum 1998). In this article, we explore the role of consumer resistance to the marketplace as it develops. This is important because in developing markets, as macro marketers have noted (Mittelstaedt and Shultz 2009), there is a need to understand the role of key stakeholders in shaping marketplace development. We place consumers, one set of key stakeholders, at center stage and study their micro-level behavior to demonstrate the impact that these individual-level decisions can have on marketplaces at the macro level.
Consumer resistance is an important but underresearched topic in consumer research (Denegri-Knott, Zwick, and Schroeder 2006). While definitions of consumer resistance tend to be dependent on context, it can be said to refer to consumers' ability to ignore, resist, and adapt market messages and product offerings in the marketplace. In the context of globalization, this issue becomes even more important, as consumers in emerging markets typically have less experience in the marketplace, along with a lack of education in how to consume. Some scholars suggest that they are therefore disempowered and have a harder time resisting marketing messages and product offerings (Applbaum 1998). As Wilk (1994) and Jackson (2004) remind us, traditional globalization research has situated this issue mostly as one where local customs, traditions, and preferences are being subverted by foreign ideologies that seek to provide seductive images of new needs for consumer goods.
Venkatesh (1995) emphasizes the importance of examining consumer behavior in a specific environment by locating and understanding the local cultural categories that are significant to that culture. This approach is called “ethnoconsumerism.” The key emphasis is on uncovering the local meanings and cultural categories rather than imposing external frameworks to understand a particular consumer culture. Here, we take this approach of focusing on cultural categories that are unique to the Indian context to examine how consumers negotiate the tension between heightened desires and local realities in one of the most important developing markets in the world today—India—to showcase a typology of strategies of self-regulation. In doing so, we highlight the tensions that arise as the Indian marketplace transforms and a local consumer culture develops, which gives us insights into how a marketplace system evolves as it globalizes (Layton and Grossbart 2006).
Consumer Desire and Resistance
Consumer desire is conceptually distinct from consumer needs or wants and is inherently tied to social context (Belk, Ger, and Askegaard 2003). That is, consumer desire manifests itself when a consumer has a passion for a particular consumption object or experience, and this passion is developed and comes alive within varying social contexts. In an emerging market setting, where we typically see a heightened interest in a wide variety of consumption objects that have newly arrived to the local marketplace, in combination with limited resources, consumer desire can become problematic for many consumers. Thus, consumer desire tends to produce tension. Many consumer desires need to be controlled rather than indulged. Controlling desire, therefore, is something the modern consumer needs to be able to do to function in the marketplace. To do this, Foucault (1988) suggests individuals must feel they have free will and agency to choose their lifestyle. This feeling of agency allows consumers to self-regulate their desires and choices (Thompson and Hirschman 1995). Daily life becomes a balancing act between social encouragement to consume and strategies to control our desires (Belk, Ger, and Askegaard 2003). In an emerging market, this conflict becomes even more heightened, as consumer desire is an affirmation of belonging to the globalized world; yet, there are constraining economic and local cultural realities that prevent indulging in such desires.
Davies and Elliott (2006) point out that it is erroneous to assume that consumers will always perceive an increase in choice in the marketplace as a benefit. In our Indian context, the marketplace was just beginning to globalize, and consumers were going through the process of making decisions in relation to the new marketplace realities they were confronted with. For example, Kumar and Bishnoi (2007) point out that at the same time as rural Indians agree that the new products available to them make life easier and improve their standard of living, they also think that these products are a waste of money and are just for “showing off.” And at the same time as rural Indian consumers perceive marketing efforts as increasing their awareness and aspirations, they also see marketing efforts as creating confusion (Kumar and Bishnoi 2007). Varman and Vikas (2007) point out that while in developed marketplaces, a relationship typically exists between the ability to consume and the experience of freedom, in India, with the exception of the elite, consumers do not experience this freedom due to their lack of access to resources. In line with this, the new choices with which our respondents were confronted did not always lead to positive consequences for them, and our aim is to document which cultural concerns were most prominent in the market development process and how consumers managed their desire in the presence of such concerns.
Consumer resistance has been conceptualized in the marketing literature as consumers acting as creative agents inventing tactics to counteract powerful corporate players (Denegri-Knott, Zwick, and Schroeder 2006). The concept of creolization, defined as consumers not simply accepting global offerings that come into their marketplaces but rather combining elements of the global and local to produce something new, is an example of how consumers enact this cultural power in the marketplace (Ger and Belk 1996). Foucault’s (1988) analysis of resistance focuses upon how power moves from external control imposed by governments to more self-governed control and discipline exerted by individuals upon themselves. As urbanization occurs, it becomes difficult to impose control and disciplinary power on people. At the micro level, people sense that their own actions lead to success or failure, thus shifting the locus of control from the external to the internal. The Foucauldian view of consumer resistance questions the neoliberal view that more choice is always accompanied with more freedom and therefore more empowerment. Our examination of strategies of control focuses on how the newly available consumption objects in an emerging market create desire and tension, and how consumers use self-regulation to navigate the tensions created.
Indian Consumerism: Ideological Shifts
As Chaudhuri and Majumdar (2006) observe, India has had three distinct consumer culture phases in the last century: “. . . the pre-independence (1947) period was characterized by the Gandhian philosophy of simple living while the post independence period was largely marked by socialist ideology of community living and self-reliance” (p. 8). It was only after liberalization in 1991 that the third phase with a new and contemporary consumption culture began (Chaudhuri and Majumdar 2006; Guha 2007; Mankekar 1999; Venkatesh 1995). Thus, many of our respondents had lived in an economy pre-1991 that offered limited choice in most product categories. In pre-1991 India, global brand awareness existed only among the urban rich and well traveled. However, although product availability was limited, there was an increasing awareness among the middle- and upper-class urban dwellers of what consumption looked like outside of the country (Mazzarella 2003).
Liberalization brought some of these choices closer to home, in particular via television, which significantly affected rising material aspirations (Varman and Belk 2008). Global products could now be consumed without having to buy them from an “imported goods” store and paying a huge price premium for import costs. Many global brands were now starting to appear on a mass scale in the market (Mazzarella 2003). Whereas pre-1991 consumers had to save money for years to buy a white good such as a refrigerator, there were now several options available, and new modes of financing such as consumer loans opened up access to these goods. Overall, Das (2002) describes the post-1991 zeitgeist in India as a time of deep mental changes in Indian society which resulted in a feeling of possibility; that India’s moment in history had finally arrived. However, Varman and Belk (2009) make the point that in today’s Indian consumer culture, these newly accessible global brands are often depicted as being oppositional to traditional Indian values, setting up “culture wars” in the marketplace.
A key point to note with all this change is the emergence of a strong middle class in India. Defining the middle class is not straightforward. As Guha (2007) notes: How substantial it actually is remains a matter of definition and interpretation. Defined most broadly, to include all households with an annual income in excess of 70,000 rupees a year (at 1998-1999 prices), the middle class consists of as many as 250 million Indians. Defined most narrowly, to exclude those who earn less than 140,000 rupees a year, it consists of only 55 million Indians. (pp. 689–90)
In the midst of all this marketplace change are many traditional belief systems that remain steadfast. Indian culture is steeped in mythology; in particular via important Hindu stories that are tightly woven into everyday Indian culture (Renou 1961). Hinduism is not seen as much as a religion as it is seen as a philosophy or a way of life, thus shaping and influencing Indian daily rituals, habits, and beliefs (Venkatesh 1995). For example, a key aspect of Hindu philosophy is the constant emphasis on an individual’s obligation to his kin and to society. Children are often told that revering elders is more important than even God by the following verse: “mata, pita, guru, daivam” (mother, father, teacher, God), which illustrates the order in which these entities should be revered, giving precedence to parents and teachers before god. Thus, sociality as being necessary for fulfilling one’s obligations in the following of the dharma is a strongly entrenched Indian ideal.
Cultural Signifiers
We focus on two product categories that affect the daily lives and lifestyles of Indian consumers considerably, and which are key cultural signifiers in present day India: food and electronics, which includes computers and white good convenience products such as microwaves, refrigerators, blenders, and televisions. These two product categories were selected because they run the gamut in terms of level of accessibility to middle-class consumers, represent aspirational consumption, and are important indicators of social status in today’s India. Food and electronics have a high level of salience in consumers' everyday lives. We are not interested in comparing and contrasting these product categories to each other; rather, we use them to showcase how consumers navigate tensions when faced with product choice.
Food: Sacred, Pure, and Spiritual
Food is a consumption category particularly tied into cultural traditions (Mintz 1985). The relevance of studying attitudes to new food choices is argued to be a mirror for the changes occurring in local cultural systems (Mintz 1997). In the Indian context, scholars have examined the sociocultural importance of food in South Asian society (e.g., Appadurai 1981), to argue that food constitutes an extremely central component of daily life in South Asia, with food preferences or avoidances able to “. . . signal caste or sect affiliation, life-cycle stages, gender distinctions and aspirations toward higher status” (Appadurai 1981, p. 495).
Given the proliferation of restaurants and menu options outside the home, generational differences among families are coming to the fore. While the older generation is firm about continuing the family food rituals and traditions, the younger generation is interested in exploring the offerings outside. The other major change in the Indian domestic food system is the increase in the number of convenience foods and appliances that can aid in food preparation. The convenience of these products is in contradiction to the tradition of elaborate preparation of meals at home, and thus food can often be at the heart of consumer culture tensions in the home.
Electronics: Gnostic Mythology and Modernity
Various western thinkers have long advocated the discourse of technology leading to societal advancement and benefit. Thompson (2004) refers to the “Gnostic Mythos” as the idea that social actions by human beings could improve mankind’s lot on Earth rather than waiting for divine intervention. This Gnostic mythos has led to an emphasis on technological advancements and modernity; a belief that having the most advanced products will lead to a better life. In India, white goods such as refrigerators are perceived to provide convenience, a better life, and also status in the community. This is especially true among the burgeoning middle class of aspirational consumers in India (Chaudhuri and Majumdar 2006). As Van Wessel (2004) finds, conspicuous consumption in the middle class is partly measured by the number, brand, and type of appliances and white goods that people own in relation to others in their immediate community. Computers in particular are very closely tied to the revolutionary changes that can be seen in modern India (Venkatesh 1995). We thus chose to focus on electronics because of their symbolic and semiotic significance. As Venkatesh (1995) notes, technology adoption is clearly linked with modernization in India.
Research Context and Methodology
We conducted our research in the city of Hyderabad (the capital of the Southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh), and in the semiurban town of Bhimavaram, a rice-growing area in eastern Andhra Pradesh. Hyderabad has a population of approximately 4.2 million, making it India’s sixth largest city. It is a city known for its unique culture and traditions relating to food, religious syncretism, and language. The Muslim Asaf Jahi dynasty, who had migrated from Northern India, ruled the city from 1591 until 1948. The city thus has a syncretic mix of Hinduism and Islam, as evidenced for example in the unique Dakhani Urdu language spoken by Hyderabadis. Food is also a distinct feature of Hyderabadi culture. The city is known for its rich and elaborate cuisine which is the legacy of the North Indian influence that syncretically combined with local tastes to create a cuisine with a strong emphasis on meat and rich spices. The people of Hyderabad are therefore more comfortable with meat-based cuisine than many other parts of India, although as with the rest of India, a large number of vegetarians do not consume meat.
The city is also building a reputation as the second Silicon Valley in India, after Bengaluru, because of its economic focus on developing the information technology sector. The government of Andhra Pradesh has actively encouraged large global IT players such as Google and Microsoft to establish large centers in the city. Hyderabad therefore offers a mix of the old and new; allowing its citizens to navigate tradition and modernity on a regular basis, making it an ideal setting for our research.
Bhimavaram has a population of approximately 140,000 people, and is in a lush, rice-producing region near the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean. Bhimavaram is considered the “big” town in the region. Traditionally, a rice-producing region, the area now has many farmers engaging in fish and shrimp farming. Both rice and aquaculture are fairly lucrative thus making the region fairly prosperous. Culturally, Bhimavaram shares some common cultural signifiers with Hyderabad such as the Telugu language and Andhra culture but is also different in that it does not have the degree of hybridity and syncretism that Hyderabad does because it did not have North Indian migration and influences. Bhimavaram offers a good contrast to Hyderabad in that it is a town rather than a city that is distinct in culture and yet has a fairly high per capita income so we can access middle-class consumers.
The researchers are an insider/outsider team, similar to Varman and Belk (2009). One of the researchers is an Anglo-American, while the other researcher was born and raised in Hyderabad and is familiar with the unique local language, customs, and traditions. We conducted depth interviews with thirteen key consumer informants in their homes—seven in Hyderabad and six in the Bhimavaram region. The interviews were triangulated with observational data and informal discussions, and these supplemental data were used to verify the themes developed from the interviews. Respondents were acquired though a combination of solicitations and the snowball method, using contacts from a local research partner who was very familiar with the local culture both in Hyderabad and in Bhimavaram. Respondents were (almost) equally divided on gender and were purposively selected to fall into the lower- to middle middle-class socioeconomic range, rather than to be representative of or generalizable to the Indian or the Andhra population at large, in line with interpretive research norms (Hirschman 1989). We followed Bijapurkar (2007) in broadly defining our middle class as having an income roughly in the range of 90,000 to 500,000 rupees per annum. In addition to income, which is not the only indicator of socioeconomic class in India (Bijapurkar 2007), we engaged in a qualitative assessment of our respondents to confirm they were in the lower- to middle middle class. We chose this range of respondents because they were actively navigating the new consumptionscape, as compared to the upper middle class for example, who have ample access to information and goods (Bijapurkar 2007). Several of our respondents came from working-class backgrounds with some of them also being first-generation migrants to the city. Participant profiles are presented in Table 1 .
Profiles of Respondents
Note: aUrban encompasses Hyderabad and Secunderabad (adjacent cities). Semiurban/rural encompasses Bhimavaram and Palakoderu (a town and neighboring village, respectively).
b,cFor Andhra Pradesh less than 3,000 rupees/month represents living below the poverty level, while 20,000 rupees/month represents a very comfortable upper middle-class lifestyle (Bijapurkar 2007).
To supplement the individual interviews and observation, which took place in the respondent’s homes, we also conducted two group interviews in Hyderabad with university students. These group interviews were conducted in same sex groups to facilitate a level of comfort in the discussions, with eight college students in each gender group, and lasted approximately sixty minutes. These university students were also in the lower- to middle middle class and were not selected to be representative of the Indian population at large but rather because they are of the generation that is most immersed in India’s changing consumer culture.
A professional local qualitative market researcher helped conduct the interviews in a mixture of English and the local Telugu language, depending on respondents' preferences. One of the researchers was present during all the interviews. The local research partner was intimately familiar with the goals of the study and the methodologies utilized (Joy 2001). Along with the interviews which took place within the respondent’s homes, observational notes were taken during the accompanying eating, drinking, and socializing before, after, and/or during the interviews. Respondents (individual and group) were each given a gift worth approximately US$5 at the end of the interview as a gesture of thanks, in line with local market research norms. Note that while we focused on food and electronics, the depth interviews were wide ranging, and products from other categories were also discussed.
Interview transcripts were translated into English each day by professional translators using the decentering method (Campbell and Werner 1970), with the local research partner and the researchers checking for meaning congruence and making alterations to the translations on an ongoing basis. Since one member of the research team speaks Telugu, the transcripts were analyzed in both the local language and in English to ensure translation veracity and to understand the local cultural categories and cues as closely as possible.
Both researchers were involved in the analysis of the data which took the form of an iterative hermeneutic analysis of the interview transcripts in conjunction with the observational and informal discussion data and the literature to discover common themes/meanings (Thompson 1997). Preliminary summaries and coding categories were developed using the interview transcripts and field notes. As analysis progressed, we further refined our coding categories and established relationships between our coding categories. Specific techniques used throughout this analytic process included summary descriptions, preliminary interpretation of themes, negative case analysis to challenge emerging themes, and category formation (Spiggle 1994).
Strategies to Navigate the Marketplace
Our purpose in this study is to understand how consumers negotiate the tension between newly formed desires and the need to self-regulate as they navigate the new Indian marketplace. As we are interested in cultural categories rather than demographic or product category characteristics, and our goal is not to generalize to India at large, we have chosen to focus on strategies which cut across respondents and product categories. We outline three primary strategies which consumers use. In line with an ethnoconsumerist approach (Venkatesh 1995), these strategies emerged from the local context and represent the cultural categories most important to our respondents. The first strategy illustrates the distance and inaccessibility that desire can create, and how local moral ideals can shape and control desire. In the second strategy, we observe the danger and immorality aspects of consumer desire and demonstrate how consumers make choices that go against social norms in this case. Finally, in the third strategy, we see desire for sociality and relationships manifesting itself, and there is a perceived low ability to self-regulate, given societal and status pressures.
Resisting Desire: Distance, Inaccessibility, and Virtue
Belk, Ger, and Askegaard (2003) note that when desired consumption experiences are distant or inaccessible, frustration can be enhanced. If there is no hope that the desired consumption experiences can be attained, though, desire can dissipate. Our respondents display two patterns when strategizing to resist their desires. In the first case, the perception of distance and inaccessibility becomes heightened because of their lack of economic ability to engage in desired consumption practices. In the second case, even when our respondents can afford a product, they refrain from buying it, in line with local frugality ideals. Belk, Ger, and Askegaard note that “By making material passion a vice, a society can make consumer desire a sin or an unacceptable transgression from which we must seek to purify ourselves” (p. 331). This idealized frugality is in contrast to discussions of the “insatiable” desire of the contemporary Indian middle class for western goods and possessions (Chaudhuri and Majumdar 2006; Gupta 2000).
All of our respondents are married and most have children still living at home, with a few cases where the children are grown and have moved away. Some respondents, especially ones with young children and limited means are especially frugal and go to extreme lengths to save money. For example, Arunjyothi, a twenty-seven-year-old homemaker with two children aged seven and ten, is of meager means and runs her household on a very tight budget. Product attributes that would not register as luxuries to most seem out of reach for her. Here, she narrates how she saved up enough money to get a remote control device for her television: Earlier, we had a TV but we did not have a remote [control device], I got the remote two or three years back. Before we had to use the TV by operating the TV buttons, now if there is a good program on some other channel we can change immediately through the remote. Another thing is that by using the remote the TV does not get spoilt, because if we go near [it] and operate it there are chances of the buttons becoming loose or falling off, but here only the remote will get spoilt if at all, and it won’t cost much to change the remote. But to repair the whole set is expensive. When the picture tube got spoilt they charged me Rs.[rupees]2000 but after the remote came it cost me only Rs.500. That is the change I notice now with electronics.
So you are aware of [other new] products [in the market]?
Aware yes, that is, I see every thing but I don’t touch them because of the cost. Like if we wash the clothes well and dry [them] in the shade we get a blue shine, so why waste money on these products [liquid detergents]. I am very economical; I run my house according to my economical position. Suppose we get some extra money, we still cannot buy anything new, because we have to think of our children’s books, pens, clothes, and so on. See, now you get different kind of pens, before we used to use to get only Reynolds blue, but now my children are insisting on Gel pens, it costs Rs. 25 each but, they say my friends are using Gel [pens] so we want it too. I have to get it for them for RS 25 each. So because of that I spend at home carefully. I can get a Reynolds refill for Rs. 8 it will be cheaper, but they don’t agree, so I cut on house expenditures and give it to them.
In the above narrative, Arunjyothi describes how she manages to accommodate her children’s demands to use gel pens rather than standard pens by cutting down on other expenditures. She self-regulates her consumption in other product categories so she can accommodate her children’s desire for the new marketplace offerings. This is in line with the importance of meeting family needs over individual ones (Viswanathan, Rosa, and Ruth 2010).
Affordability constrains her ability to do this with other consumption objects, though. Her sense of control changes when asked about a product that she cannot afford. Computers, as mentioned earlier, are seen as an important product for the aspirational class. When discussing computers she gets very agitated: Nowadays no one is going in for typing or short hand, so if I can convince my husband and get a computer, I can have some knowledge about computers. By the time my children grow up I can get some more knowledge and try using it to get work done on a computer.
What is your idea about E-mail?
Because I cannot afford a computer, I have dropped the idea about it altogether. For me it is like the fox and the grapes story, sour grapes, some things which we cannot achieve or afford we should not think about, so I have dropped the idea. The thing which we cannot afford, it is a waste to desire it. Angry, angry I am angry and I feel frustrated also because I have so much interest but I cannot afford to buy. I feel there are so many changes in today’s world and I cannot keep pace with it because of my financial position.
She continues in this tone when asked about things that she does not own and cannot afford but would like to get some day. The new consumer desires Arunjyothi is confronted with result in her negotiating the distance and inaccessibility that are inherent in many of these consumption objects. She buys things that she is not interested in to accommodate her children’s desires—gel pens—and is unable to access other things she desires—e-mail. Her anger indicates her sense of lack of control in the face of increased choice in the marketplace that is not within her reach. When she is able to self-regulate and still chooses not to buy, she retains her sense of control, but this is only the case with certain product categories. As Foucault (1988) argues, when people are given too much choice they may deliberately choose to reduce the amount of consumption or engagement to maintain a sense of balance. The inaccessibility leads to her to giving up on her dream of owning a computer.
Some of our other respondents with lower incomes such as Anil, Ramakrishna, Krishnaveni, and Kanchana are also frugal in their spending and are also very conscious of the new choices that liberalization has brought. Yet, some of them, unlike Arunjyothi, can afford these new products but are steadfastly holding on to frugality. For instance, Anil says: Yes she [my wife] wants to buy a cooler [an inexpensive air conditioner like appliance], but I say no I don’t want it, we will wait, because the children will get used to it, and tomorrow if we are not financially sound they may suffer. We may be gone or there may be other ups and downs in life then if they get used to comforts now it will be difficult for them at that time. As does Ramakrishna: Actually by birth we have learnt to adjust to anything, because we had little income and only enough to survive, so under any situation we will adjust, so the same way we have brought up our children—to adjust. Even if we have a desire we learnt to control it.
Hinduism is the dominant religion in India followed by Islam and Christianity. Both Hinduism and Islam address the issue of how to manage desire. Venkatesh (1995) notes that in Hinduism, spirituality, and materialism can coexist nonproblematically. As Belk, Ger, and Askegaard (2000) explain: In various forms of both Hinduism and Islam, there is a simultaneity of the religious and the erotic or the passionate, the body and the mind. In their more mystic forms, desire is seen to be an attachment that prevents freedom and joy if one remains attached to it and cannot move on. But desire is not condemned as evil. There is also a situationalism in the Eastern sanction of desire: in some situations, for some men, some pleasures can be appropriate. (p. 109)
The tension that arises from wanting to enjoy consumerism while also renouncing it manifests itself in modern Indian society with some consumers choosing not to consume. This strategy of nonconsumption that could potentially benefit their lives is facilitated by cultural norms that idealize frugality and the need to control desire. This idealizing allows for easier and greater self-regulation than would be otherwise and can lead to a greater sense of control for being able to achieve the ideal. This is especially the case where external forces such as affordability are not the reason for nonconsumption but internal ones that compel the individual to hold off on consumption. Thus, Arunjyothi, who is constrained by the external factor of affordability, is angry about her lack of ability to consume all that she desires, but Anil and Ramakrishna who are not constrained by affordability but are invoking internal reasons for controlling consumer desire are more comfortable with resisting consumption.
Negotiating Consumer Desire: Danger, Immorality, and Deliberation
Since desire is seen to be an emotional situation that needs to be managed and controlled, it necessarily creates tension between the rational self and the emotional one (Belk, Ger, and Askegaard 2003). Consumers see deep tensions in trying to negotiate these two worlds. There are many modern consumption contexts that when looked upon with a local values lens can represent danger or immorality (Belk, Ger, and Askegaard 2003). Sometimes, there is not always a clear societal consensus as to which consumption activities are good for the individual or for the society. Neelkant, a semiurban consumer, gives this assessment of the social impact of an increase in choices, civilization, and prosperity: With this [need for comforts] we increase our civilization and standards. In olden days man was not civilized, now he works hard to get more comforts and money and since improvement is there, man works hard and strives to get those comforts.
What connection is there between civilization and comfort?
[A]: Connection is there, in olden days he never had this comfort and no income, but now since comforts have come he is striving hard to earn more income. Now after getting all these comforts man will turn to entertainment next.
Entertainment next?
You see if any country is turning towards entertainment it means that country is prospering, self-sufficient.
While making the connection between choice and prosperity rather overtly, Neelkant is still adamantly against buying certain products even though he can afford them. He refuses to buy a fridge because he believes storing food in a refrigerator and eating leftovers and food that he calls stale is bad for health. He has also bought a television only recently after waiting for his children to finish school since a television would be a distraction for them. In Neelkant’s case, the decision to not consume goes beyond invoking the frugality ideal. We see a deliberate analysis about the uses and value of the products themselves and then self-regulation of what he really needs and what he does not that prevents him from buying certain goods and rejecting others. Thus, while he has clear ideas about the positive societal implications of the development of a consumer culture, these market forces do not sway his determination to consume or not consume certain goods.
We see this deliberate reflexivity reveal itself with other respondents. For instance, in response to vegetarianism and the consumption of meat products, consumers displayed surprisingly varied reactions. Vegetarianism is an important way of life for many Hindu South Indians and is adhered to fairly strictly for a variety of cultural reasons (Khare and Rao 1986). Vegetarianism in India is linked to religion (Hinduism) and to the Hindu caste system, where some communities and castes are allowed to eat meat while others are strictly forbidden from it. While the modern way of life has brought some relaxation to this strict rule for urban vegetarian Indians, even those who occasionally eat meat outside the home consider it sacrilegious to cook it inside the home (Chatterjee 1989). Meat thus has clear danger and immorality characteristics. The term used when strict religious rules are broken loosely translates to saying that a contamination of dharma or the religious path has occurred. Although religious and social attitudes toward meat are deeply entrenched, we saw a variety of responses to the social norms surrounding meat eating.
Some of our interviewees were vegetarian while others came from families that traditionally consumed meat products. The topic of vegetarianism is a sensitive one because of its close connection to religion and local culture, the violation of which has dangerous or immoral overtones. Yet, one of our vegetarian respondents, Krishnaveni, changed her mind about meat eating where her children’s welfare was concerned: If children grow up and develop a taste [for foreign foods]? Then I will try to learn and make it for them. For instance, nowadays they are eating non-vegetarian [food]. Are they breaking tradition? No problem as long as it is good for health, and if they are getting extra nutrition. It is becoming a new tradition, let them.
Anil, on the other hand, who comes from a family that traditionally ate meat, now rejects meat, and he and his wife resist serving it to their children:
Actually we have not given them nonvegetarian food. They don’t eat it. Our parents fed us meat, we are used to eating meat, but we don’t want our children to get used to meat. Many people have told us it is not good. Because their brains won’t be sharp. See killing another living creature and eating it is not good, we have committed that mistake, we don’t want our children to do it. Do you feel more Indian that way? No, nothing like that, one of the reasons is that their brain is sharp and there is a glow to their skin. How do you know? Generally by observation, the skin of a vegetarian is very smooth compared to non-vegetarians. What else?
Also if we give them meat, from now itself that feeling of killing another animal and eating will come in their mind. My daughter, when we get meat for the guests, she does not even come near it when we are eating, let alone coming near the table, she will go out of the house when we are eating.
Here, Anil interprets the meaning of meat as being unhealthy for his children and unethical but does not attribute any sense of “Indian-ness” to vegetarianism. In both the above cases, the decisions made go against the common arguments for or against meat eating in India, but the parents have rationalized and attributed meanings whereby they see their choice as providing an advantage for their children. The meanings attributed to meat eating are linked to their own individually thought out perceptions of the benefits and drawbacks, which in these cases are not the same as local cultural norms and mores. Thus, danger and immorality in breaking social codes is not seen as a huge transgression because they have rationalized that these choices are good for their children’s well-being, a widely socially acceptable motivation. Children play a very central role in the familial structure in India, thus their well-being prompts consumers to assess the benefits of consumption and self-regulate their consumption behaviors in a deliberate manner.
Here, we see consumers engaging in a dialectic with the marketplace, choosing to self-govern choice and to resist options that are strongly imposed through the culture even if this kind of self-governance of choice is seen as dangerous or immoral, such as eating meat in a vegetarian family. This form of self-governance, negotiation, and reflexivity is especially high in the context of children where Indian parents see themselves as key figures in determining their children’s well-being.
Giving into Consumer Desire: Need for Sociality
The desire for consumption to enhance relationships is quite prominent in our data and is also identified by Belk, Ger, and Askegaard (2003) as one of the primary motivations for consumer desire. Thus, when giving into consumer desire means enhancing relationships with others, we see very little resistance to desire. Given the stratification of Indian society along caste and economic standing, status plays a very important role in how Indian society is structured, and thus social pressure exhibits a significant influence on the development of consumer culture as the country globalizes (Mehta and Belk 1991). Not surprisingly, we uncover a strong link between consumption decisions and associated status concerns, especially when we examine attitudes toward food and eating out.
While occasional eating outside the home has long been a part of the Indian cultural milieu, only recently has it attained a higher level of social acceptability in South India, although this is seen primarily in the urban regions. There has recently been a rise in food offerings in the marketplace, and studies have found that there are status associations with being able to eat out (Eckhardt 2005). Chatterjee (1989) argues that in India, there is an important distinction between what happens in the home and the outside world and that the home has evolved as a synonym of Indian tradition. “The home in its essence must remain unaffected by the profane activities of the material world” (pp. 238-239). Thus, if one wants to experiment with new foods, it is usually done outside the home.
With the introduction of restaurants on a mass scale, a sense of prestige and cultural tourism is provided to consumers, especially with foreign cuisine restaurants, and eating out can therefore be a status enhancing activity (Eckhardt 2005; Goyal and Singh 2007). Trying to capitalize on this changing perception, restaurants offering various kinds of cuisine have proliferated all over India. Here, Arunjyothi narrates her experience of eating out: Ok, what do you feel when you go out to eat on occasion? I feel nice, because I usually keep these outings for the children so that they should not feel that their mother is economical, to divert them from that thought, we go out. So that they also can go and tell their friends proudly that they went out for food, because the friends keep saying that they went out to hotel [restaurant] parties, cinemas, so my children should also have something to tell them. They should not feel inferior. Do they feel great? Yes they feel great, because when they say my mother took us to a restaurant, the friends say oh! Your mother took you to the restaurant, so the children feel that it is a status symbol nowadays. What is this status symbol? They should not think oh! She always stays at home and does not go out, they should also know, oh! She also goes to a restaurant. That is the status symbol of today. To manage society I do these things.
Van Wessel (2004) argues that in contemporary India, “. . . middle-class status demands levels of consumption and practices that are in tune with ‘the times', meaning that one must maintain the higher standard of living that upward mobility and the availability of new consumer goods have made ‘normal’” (p. 97). In other words, middle-class consumers feel a pressing need to be social equals with their peers, and do so to a great extent through consumption (Gupta 2000). As we see with university-aged males, this theme is a recurring one: How have your eating habits changed [in the last 10 years]? Fast food. People prefer pizza, burger, and noodles. What else? Soft drinks Different varieties. Impress girl friends. If we take them to Pizza Hut, Burger Point, Baker’s Inn. Our level goes up. Why do you like to eat burgers and pizzas? Everyone eats them so we also want to eat them. Taste. Change. By watching others eat, we also want to eat. What is the feeling? Why should only he be posh? I can be posh too. So you say by eating these foods you get a posh feeling? Status. How? See suppose somebody with us is eating a burger and we eat rice in front of him, we will become cheap.
Thus, we see most of our respondents giving into desire for new foods. For the older age group, there is acknowledgment that there is an element of upward mobility associated with eating at these places but yet there is resistance to the logic of why this should be so. For example, when Anil is asked about his children’s proclivity for eating out at Western style restaurants (pizza or burger joints, bakeries), he responds:
In one way it is a fashion, going out and eating with friends, sitting and eating in the car, going out with boyfriends, sitting and eating with them, drinking cool drinks. What is the feeling? Only a rich feeling. Like instead of spending 2 or 3 rupees on samosas in a hotel, here they come to these bakeries and get a thrill in spending 100 or 200 rupees, that’s all. What is the actual feeling? Only a feeling of richness even if they are not rich—mainly to spend 100 rupees. Yes, yes, show off, that’s all. I too can spend and eat in such places, costly places.
Fulfilling their children’s need to eat out for status reasons dictates the extent to which our respondents are able to manage desire. Mimetic desire, or desire that is initiated by observing other’s consumption plays an important role with our respondents. Along with Belk, Ger, and Askegaard (2003), we find that our respondents' desire to consume often stems from social concerns. The sociality, social validation, and mimetic concerns overpower any effort at self-regulation, and this can be sensed in our older respondents' frustration at having to consume in ways that they may not be to their liking. We see very little room for self-regulation of desire here, and thus very little control over consumption decisions, with the result being a sense of a lack of control among consumers. Our respondents feel powerless to control their consumer desire in light of the need for sociality, yet, they are aware of this paradox, and thus are still reflexive in their choices.
Discussion
We examine the process by which lower- to middle middle-class consumers in an emerging market negotiate the tensions brought about by consumer desire as the marketplace globalizes. In India, the proliferation of new product choices leads to tension between traditional ways of being and modern ways of consuming, which consumers must traverse. This can be characterized as a negotiation between traditional systems of desire and modern consumer culture. Our study demonstrates that as consumers engage in making consumption choices, they are actively negotiating their choices and thus show reflexivity in their choices and in the level to which they choose to engage with modern consumer culture. This builds upon Arnould and Thompson (2005) and Kjeldgaard and Askegaard (2006) in terms of further illuminating the relationship between globalization and everyday consumption practices. It also builds upon Eckhardt and Mahi (2004) in that we uncover the cultural categories relevant to whether new products entering the globalized Indian marketplace will be accepted, rejected, or transformed by consumers.
Our examination of this negotiation of consumer desire leads us to develop a typology of strategies to resist consumer desire (see Table 2 ). The three strategies showcase varying levels of self-regulation of consumer desire. In accordance with Foucault (1988), our data suggest that when consumers can take part in the dialectic between themselves and the marketplace, they can experience a greater sense of control in self-regulating desire. Also important is that our respondents are actively and reflexively engaging in making choices—note in Table 2 that degree of reflexivity is high for all levels of resistance. Past literature would lead us to believe that consumers in emerging markets are eager to embrace new products, and hence the degree of reflexivity would be low. Thus, we believe this high level of reflexivity is a key contribution of this study and demonstrates that our consumers have learned “how to become consumers,” which in itself is a structure of global consumer culture.
Typology of Strategies Used to Navigate Consumption Tensions
Note: aThe high degree of reflexivity in all three strategies is a key contribution of this article, as contrary to past research, it indicates that consumers do not blindly accept new products as their local markets globalize, but rather they actively reflect on their choices.
As can be seen in Table 2, for the first strategy of control, consumers see many of the new products they encounter in the marketplace as distant and inaccessible. They self-regulate their consumption by choosing not to consume, whether because of their lack of economic ability to consume, or through enacting a frugality ideal to justify their resistance. In the second strategy, our respondents are aware of the danger and immorality aspects of their consumer desire, and deliberately negotiate cultural norms and new desires brought about through the introduction of global consumer culture. In the third case, the need for sociality becomes dominant. The status aspects of consumption, which manifests itself very strongly in our data due to the social stratification of Indian society, forces some consumers, who in other contexts are very frugal and careful with their choices, to be conspicuous in their spending because of the social validation of their actions. In this case, there is very little room for self-regulation, thus resulting in a sense of frustration and lack of control. In all cases, we see a high level of deliberation and negotiation between the traditional and modern ways of being.
Our findings indicate that our respondent’s self-regulation and control of consumer desire are influenced by local cultural values such as frugality ideals, social validation, and status-enhancing concerns. The various ways consumers play with meanings of global products that enter their local marketplace gives evidence that though there may not be much choice available to them in many product categories, they can and do actively reject and accept products based on certain dominant values, while exhibiting a level of reflexivity in negotiating consumer desire. Sometimes consumers' choices are in line with important cultural norms and values, and sometimes these new ascribed meanings go against local norms.
Thus, in our findings, we see a structuring and restructuring of traditions and norms in the face of new choices. Deleuze and Guattari (1977) point out that the vitality of a culture is always both collapsing and being restructured. This seems to be what is happening in India with the entrance of global consumer culture, and the choices consumers make contribute to both the collapse and the restructuring. The marketplace is being both deterritorialized, as it becomes more global but also reterritorialized, as local consumption norms continue to be influential and create local patterns of consumption.
Our work also extends Eckhardt and Mahi’s (2004) framework, which examined the role of consumer agency in the globalization process from a macromarketing standpoint. The authors introduced a way of understanding when products would be accepted, transformed, or rejected as they made their way to new cultural contexts during the globalization process. We empirically verify their framework and outline the conditions under which Indian consumers accept, transform, or reject new products in their marketplaces. Thus, we build upon their framework by identifying strategies that consumers use during this process (see Table 2). For example, we find that rejection occurs when the product presents a stark contrast to key religious or cultural ideals such as frugality or the Hindu/Indian ideal of resisting desire. Similarly, we find that consumers examine and change meanings to fit their cultural ideals, such as a vegetarian family choosing to serve meat to their children, which goes against religious ideals when their health ideals override them. We extend Eckhardt and Mahi (2004) by showcasing how consumers can bend even seemingly entrenched cultural categories such as vegetarianism. Future researchers using this framework should include the reflexivity and the strategies we find here as they are looking to identify patterns in product acceptance, transformation, and rejection in the globalization process. Our study also contributes to understanding how consumer resistance manifests itself in the globalization process in emerging markets and how it thereby shapes the larger marketplace. Our respondents are using cultural categories such as idealized frugality and sociality concerns specific to the Indian context to actively reflect on their choices and attribute meanings to products that then lead them to self-regulate their desire to consume. By doing this, they are affecting the market around them, and expressing their voice in a deliberate way. That our respondents are doing this is contrary to Baudrillard (1983), who argues that when consumers decode messages from a dominant culture vastly different to their everyday lived realities, an unanalyzed rejection occurs. For our respondents, when they come into contact with new products, they sometimes reject the products, but if they do so, it is for the most part not unanalyzed, and they also accept and sometimes transform the products, depending on what the cultural concerns relating to the product are. Our respondents are more in line with duGay’s (1996) conception of consumers as, “. . . autonomous, self-regulating and self-actualizing individual actors, seeking to maximize their ‘quality of life’ by assembling a lifestyle, or lifestyles, through personalized acts of choice in the market place” (p. 77). While duGay’s analysis is referring to consumers in developed countries, his ideas seem to be applicable in an emerging market context as well, perhaps more so than has been acknowledged (Applbaum 1998).
Consumers sometimes engage in acts of resistance and at other times do not. Thus, there is never a dramatic “escape” from the market or from the structures that reproduce power, but there are shifts and ruptures instead. No respondent in our study could be labeled categorically resistant to consumption in all areas although all displayed rather strong instances of resistance. We see some instances of self-regulation and control against the dominant forces of the marketplace, and see evidence of this in the struggle that our consumers feel in making choices in the marketplace. Thus, our work demonstrates that consumers even in emerging markets do not always accept the dominant discourses of the marketplace but instead can create their own discourses. From a macromarketing perspective, we argue that by creating these discourses, consumers are impacting marketplace offerings thus shaping markets and consumerism by their reflexivity.
Given that our setting is in a transitional economy undergoing rapid change while shifting from a socialist to a capitalist economy, certain nationalist ideologies are also relevant here. The idea of frugality and self-reliance/swadeshi is an old one that is slowly being replaced by the new consumerist/capitalist one. Van Wessel (2004) finds that while middle-class consumers discuss the importance of Gandhian values, they actually do not demonstrate much ability to self-regulate their consumption with most showing eagerness toward buying and consuming goods to ensure their social standing in their immediate peer group. In contrast to Van Wessel (2004), we find that our respondents actually hold off on consumption in several cases even when they realize that a particular good may enhance their social standing and status and even when affordability is not an issue. This is in line with Varman and Belk (2009), who also find that although the old ideology of swadeshi has morphed over the years, it is still relevant in consumption movements.
In sum, the strategies of control we outline in Table 2 can be used to understand how emerging markets are making the transition from a local marketplace to a global marketplace. More specifically, it is a way to understand the consumer’s role as a key stakeholder in this process, as compared to the oft-discussed role of the government and multinational companies. In the same way that Viswanathan, Rosa, and Ruth (2010) illuminate the nature and importance of the subsistence consumer–merchant in the development of marketing systems in emerging markets, so we illuminate the nature and importance of the agentic consumer navigating his or her newfound global marketplace, and subsequently shaping the nature of what that system will look like.
Our work has several macromarketing implications. First, outlining agentic strategies of consumer control allow us to see how marketing and community life are embedded in one another (Layton and Grossbart 2006), as community-wide values and beliefs are key to the local cultural categories which become salient in giving in to or resisting consumer desire. Second, the high level of reflexivity shown by our respondents in making their choices, even when they are unable to resist a particular choice, shows consumers to be active participants in consumption. This supports the argument made by macromarketers (Mittelstaedt and Shultz 2009) that consumers are indeed key stakeholders in marketplace development and may indeed be actively shaping the form of consumerist society in India.
Third, recent work in macromarketing has focused on poor-, low-income consumers in developed countries and in examining ways by which these consumers can be integrated into a consumerist society in a just manner (Laczniak and Santos, 2011; Santos and Laczniak, 2009). It can be argued that middle-class consumers in developing countries also lack resources such as good information and inadequate product offerings thus need to be included in the discussion on provision of social and distributive justice as they make product choices. Our results whereby all our respondents show a high level of reflexivity in their choices indicates that there is some consumer learning occurring. Future research should examine the extent to which models of distributive justice created for poor-, low-income consumers are applicable to lower- to middle middle-class consumers in developing countries and how lower- to middle middle-class consumers might be circumventing the lack of resources to become informed consumers.
Fourth, cultural categories that we find significant in our data such as philosophical/religious and nationalistic beliefs support earlier research in macromarketing that examines the impact of unique local cultural categories that can have a broad impact on consumer choices and in subsequently shaping the marketplace (Eckhardt and Mahi 2004; Mittelstaedt 2002; Varman and Belk 2009; Venkatesh 1995). Our work examines individual-level self-regulation strategies and cultural categories in the acceptance/rejection decision as well as how consumers bend and transform even seemingly rigid cultural categories, thus extending Eckhardt and Mahi’s (2004) macromarketing framework. Future work should further extend this framework by examining other processes and constructs such as the level of access and sociality dimensions that may affect consumer choice and agency in emerging markets as they globalize. Finally, our insights hopefully give macromarketers a framework with which to understand how the tensions between marketing and society may be reduced as a market moves from a local to global one.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Vinita Pothina for her assistance in data collection, their respondents for sharing their insights with them, and Soren Askegaard for his insightful comments on earlier versions of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.