Constellations, Configurations and Consumption: Exploring Patterns of Consumer Behaviour Amongst U.K. ABSTRACT - This paper extends existing U.S. U.K. consumers within the framework of symbolic interactionist approaches to understanding self. Margaret K. Hogg and Paul C.N.Michell (1997) ,Constellations, Configurations and Consumption: Exploring Patterns of Consumer Behaviour Amongst U.K. Shoppers, in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 24, eds. Merrie Brucks and Deborah J. MacInnis, Provo, UT. CONSTELLATIONS, CONFIGURATIONS AND CONSUMPTION: EXPLORING PATTERNS OF CONSUMER BEHAVIOUR AMONGST U.K. This paper extends existing U.S. U.K. consumers within the framework of symbolic interactionist approaches to understanding self. The aggregation of choices across products and services amongst consumers has been explored in a series of U.S. Symbolic interactionism proposes that individuals make sense of their world in terms of the social realities from which they derive their identities; and that actions and behaviours constitute ways of enacting their social reality and identities. Social role performance are learned behaviors that are culturally determined. 146;s actual role performance cannot be studied by assessing only the requirements of his/her social position since the individual combines the broad culturally defined demands of his/her position with individually-defined goals.
The interdependence between the cultural context and the individual context can be seen when examining the role of parents, mothers and fathers as consumers and shoppers. Their social role performance involves learned behaviours which are culturally determined, and yet these demands are mediated by individually-defined goals. Self image and self concepts are also central to this examination of the relationship between self and consumption. This paper reports constellations which can be associated with groups of U.K. 146; which represent non consumption which involves both non choice and anti choice. Non choices can include products and services which are not purchased (possibly because they are outside the means of the consumer). The general research objective proposed that the composition of the intermediate patterns could be established via the quantitative analysis of a large consumer database using correspondence analysis. Previous studies of joint consumption (Wells 1968, Alpert and Gatty 1969, Solomon and Buchanan 1991) have employed the analysis of large consumer databases in pursuit of evidence of patterns of joint consumption.
For this study data was extracted from a large, commercial database: BMRB/TGI which is compiled from an annual consumer survey based on straified sampling using self completion postal questionnaires which are distributed to 40,000 households to generate 25,000 usable responses. The BMRB/TGI contingency tables contain aggregated categorical data. The formation of the consumption combinations: constellations, anti constellations and configurations, was seen as determined by the interaction of three forces: symbolic-functional, physiological-esteem-self actualization, and expressive-instrumental. 146;), and health and diet (which were linked to sports and keep fit equipment). The most important new addition to the product/service components in this model building was represented by the inclusion of retailers as a separate and identifiable category. Data was extracted from the BMRB/TGI database on users of eight mail order catalogue titles (representing the eight major U.K. The data matrix for the study consisted of over two thousand rows by eight columns. Correspondence analysis was used to identify potential groups and subgroups among the users of U.K. The relationship between the mail order catalogues (the column profiles) and the dimensions can be seen from Table 2. Inertia indicates how well each column or row is represented by a particular dimension.
The inertias for the seven dimensions produced by correspondence analysis of the BMRB/TGI data are shown in Table 3. Over 60% of the inertia is represented by the plot of first two axes. A two stage procedure was adopted in constructing and interpreting the constellations. The tables of transition formulae were examined to identify constellations amongst the row profiles from which to elicit product constellations and anti constellations. 146; which were relevant to the users of the catalogue which could be linked to that dimension or axis. 146; should be, particularly in the absence of any preceding research using correspondence analysis for identifying combinations in the data set. Table 3 had shown that nearly 61% of the inertia in the data had been accounted for on the first two axes, and that the remaining 40% inertia had been accounted for by the remaining five dimensions. 146; of categories by groups of shoppers, and some of this information was extracted from the BMRB/TGI database and was included in the correspondence analysis of the cross tabulated data. Implicit non consumption could be constructed from the absence of specific categories from the constellations.
