Merry Christmas - Marketing, psychology and the world

Santa Claus, Christmas carols, gifts, endless queues at the malls and the local post offices, house decorations and more human externalities! Christmas is here! Hohoho!! But, what does Christmas mean for us? Why "Merry Christmas"? Does Santa really exist? How could Christmas decoration both in houses and in retail stores affect our psychology? Marketers and psychologists are actually curious human beings that have studied almost every aspect of human and consumer behavior, including Christmas psychology! Santa Claus really exists? Santa Claus, also known as Saint Nicholas, Father Christmas or simply "Santa", is a mythical...

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Marketing & Social Psychology for a Better Future

Because Marketing is interested in persuasion, changing attitudes and provoking specific behaviours, it has always used psychological theories, and more specifically theories coming from Social Psychology. As early as 1928, the famous work of Edward Bernays on Propaganda, one of the many ancestors of marketing and Freud's nephew,explicitly refers to several social psychologist’s work in order to address and influence the masses to sell them products, for example by manipulating the nature of the source of information to for better influence in claims. Apart from theories and experiments, Social Psychology also brought many a technique...

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Cross-Cultural Consumer Behavior

What are the key cultural constructs or dimension? The constructs of individualism and collectivism represent the  most broadly used dimensions of cultural variability for cross-cultural comparison. In individualistic (IND) cultures, people tend to prefer independent relationships to others and to subordinate the goals of their ingroups to their own personal goals. In collectivistic (COL) cultures, in contrast, individuals tend to prefer interdependent relationships to others and to subordinate their personal goals to those of their ingroups. The key distinction involves the extent to which one defines the self in relation to others....

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