This chapter challenges the ethnic identity understanding as a homogenic construct that group members share based on their position in the acculturation process. The authors claim this understanding is based on a false notion of individual identity. Taking a cue from Hall and Laclau and Mouffe, the authors claim that ethnic identity is not a reflection of a fixed, natural state of being, but a process of becoming. Therefore, drawing on components of identity as a means of market segmentation, beyond the level of the individual consumer within a given the moment, becomes a redundant exercise. To illustrate the argument, they share with the reader research with a second-generation British-South Asian and describe their identity negotiation and self-perception. They make a call to marketers to avoid the reliance on fixed concepts of identity and shift their focus to strategies that accommodate more complex and fluid understandings of identity construction.
TopIntroduction
Marketing perceptions of consumer identity have changed substantively over the last 60 years. Early conceptualisations see identity types emerging from a relatively fixed framework of consumer characteristics (for example: gender, race, lifestyle or personality characteristics). Following this, founders of modern marketing e.g. Wrendl Smith’s (1956) or Kotler (1972) claimed that it is possible and even recommended to categorise the heterogeneous collection of consumers in its entirety into smaller groups of supposed homogeneity on the basis of these distinct consumer characteristics. The benefits of this were identified thus:
“Through market segmentation the organisation can provide higher value to customers by creating a marketing mix that addresses the specific needs and concerns of the selected segment.” (Kotler, 1972)
By the 1980s, the emergent post-modern turn in the social sciences gave rise to a more fluid and fractured understanding of what consumer identity looked like. With this, consumers were afforded far more agency than before, in terms of the fact that they themselves were defining their own identity through multiple group identities based on a whole variety of socio-cultural characteristics and traits. Important work emerged in the area of Intersectionality (e.g. Gopaldas and Fischer 2012; Epp and Price, 2010; Epp, Schau and Price, 2014; and Canniford and Shankar, 2013) that claims that individuals can “belong” in many different ways and to many different objects of attachments. These can vary from a particular person to the whole of the community, in a concrete or abstract way, to a stable, contested or transient way.
One problem with all previous understandings of marketing segmentation, both fixed and fluid and modern and postmodern, is that it presents a view of consumer markets in which social categories somehow become independent of their own members. It assumes that the self is required to adjust to identity categories surrounding her/him.
Instead, we claim that individual identity is the result of inter negotiations between multiple attachments and inter-negotiation of the meaning the individual attach to each category.
We take cue from writers such as Hall (1996) who claim that consumer identity is not a reflection of a fixed, natural state of being, but a process of becoming. The meaning of social signifiers such as economic class, Britishness, religion, masculinity and so forth, are subject to continual change. Identity then becomes every individual’s unique and dynamic blend of unfolding meanings, which might vary across the different spaces and time snapshots of every separate consumption opportunity. Because of this, identity is entirely an individual project, any recognition of identity above the level of the individual is a socially constructed discourse of what a group or collective identity might look like.
In this sense, drawing on components of identity as a means of market segmentation, beyond the level of the individual consumer within a given the moment, becomes a redundant exercise, because such segmentation requires at least some stable underpinning framework of understanding or blueprint of meaning both for individuals and collections of individuals about what those components of identity are.