Mean Making

Mean Making

1. Consumption as Self Knowing

   • Sources of meaning
     • Public Meanings
       • Exchange/Financial Value, Use Value, Sign Value
     • Private Meanings
       • Affective Values, Personal History, Personal Identity
         • Objects/Possession
           • tangible/concrete
           • Signs
           • shaped by human intentions and psychic energy (cultivation)
           • more obvious and tangible role in the formation of our self.
   • STAGE 1: Document consumers’ cultivation of private meaning
     • Unpack private meanings ‘cultivated’ through consumers’ everyday engagement with goods
       • McCracken’s Meaning Transfer Model
   • Case Studies/Theories
     • Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton (1981) The Meaning of Things
       • Personal Level
         • Symbols/objects mediate conflicts within the self
         • Interactions with objects shape the self
       • Cultivation of ‘self’ via cultivation of objects
         • Develops from interactions with environment
           • Negotiation
             • From feedback to acts of control
           • Control
           • Reflection
           • Cultivation
       • Social Level
         • Objects as signs of differentiation/integration
         • Objects as signs of status
         • Objects as role models
         • Objects as mementos of cherished relationships
   • STAGE 2: Identify existing physical referents for desired meanings
   • Conclusion
     • Goods...they sign values, exchange values, use values, emotional, aesthetic values
     • strategic resources to communicate ‘status’ but as means through which one discovers the ‘self’
     • managed communication= desirable meanings = attached to products, brands and issues

2. Consumption as Daydreaming

   • Advertising
     • key source of for our imagination
       • teaches us what suitable dreams there are
         • Feel appreciated and rewarded
         • Will be more like famous and wealthy people
         • Be held in high esteem by others
         • Will enjoy the adventure or escape you want
     • Why advertising and marketing practitioners need to know about consumer passions
       • Increasingly, consumption is being viewed as mainly experiential (experiences) and hedonic (pleasure
       • Never satisfied- dreaming of owning appears to be much more pleasurable than ownership itself
   • From embodied experiences to pleasures of the imagination
     • Hedonic experiential consumption (HEC):
       • Centre of consumption is the experience
         • Emphasis on fantasies, feelings, fun and emotion
           • Traditional hedonism - Embodied, sensual hedonic experiences
           • Modern hedonism - Pleasures of the imagination
   • Desire
     • “Specific wishes inflamed by imagination, fantasy and longing for transcendent pleasure” - Belk
       • needs are anticipated, controlled, denied
       • Desires are overpowering: something we give into
     • Desire: the basis of consumer daydreams
       • Daydreams intensify desires
         • Fueling desire
           • Campbell’s (1987) modern autonomous imaginative hedonist, consumer
             • found in anticipatory daydreams of ownership
             • Consumers are autonomous – constantly moving imagined virtues from one object to another
             • disappointing
           • McCracken’s (1988) displaced meaning
             • Goods act as bridges between buyer and a displaced meaning
             • ideals are displaced to another 'time/place'.
             • enables us to reach our ideal and continue with mundane living life
           • McCracken’s (1988) Diderot Effects
             • old dressing gown
               • Forces consumers to maintain cultural consistency in acquiring complementary goods
         • Belk 2003
           • Desires are exciting
             • attachment to desire
               • constant search for desire
   • market recogintion
     • Website wishlists e.g Amazon – desire
       • YouTube - ‘Unboxing’ – anticipation, culmination of desire

3. Consumption as Status Marking

4. Consumption as Practice