Developing consumer attitude is a prolonged and complex process. Consumers build perceptions on products, services, and marketing policies of companies by considering the extent of competitive advantage being offered. Consumer attitude is built when the consumer perceptions stay for sustainable period and are endorsed by their peers in an interactive manner. This chapter discusses various strategies for emerging companies to develop positive consumer attitude for their products and services in reference to consumption culture, shopping trends, varying consumer preferences, and shopping ambiance. The process of consumer attitude formation is delineated in the chapter and discussions argue about building customer-centric marketing strategies for the companies to develop a win-win marketing platform.
TopConsumption Culture
Early neoclassical economics conceptualized that the consumers determine which products and services would survive in the competitive marketplace by actively pursuing maximum individual utility. While this consumer retained the culturally driven decision making attributes such as masculinity or femininity embedded in the culture, needs, affordability, price, social intervention, and self-reference criterion. At the macro level, consumption was marginalized through Say's law, which holds that excessive acquisition of commodities for consumption is potentially dangerous, because saving and investment drive the economy. The rise of mass consumption has influenced cultural gender sensitivity in consumption across the social, demographic, and cultural segments (Koritz and Koritz, 2001).
Traditional consumption practice is often assimilated to the generic preferences of ethnic culture. There has been a sustained interest in ethnic consumer developing composite cultural identities in emerged multi-cultural demographic contexts. The transitions among mainstream consumers and the local–global culture dichotomy are exposed to a wide diversity. The learnt, acquired, and shared consumption cultures among the range of local, global cultural demographics and markets deploy varied consumer attitudes. The customer focused marketing strategies of companies often drive consumer acculturation into foreign cultures as other discrete influences in multi-cultural marketplaces and builds a more coherent interaction with changing consumers' perceptions (Kipnis et al, 2014).