We build on an emerging perspective (Canniford and Bajde 2015; Lury 2004, 2009) that views the brand as an entity with dynamic meanings negotiated among numerous social actors. Where we live, where we work, the cars we drive, and the toothpaste we use often are the results of what we hear and who we speak to. We borrowed from ideas on stereotype change to explore how influencers can change brand associations by changing the perceived homogeneity of the brands consumers. We assessed the significance of the indirect path by calculating at varying levels of typicality (e.g., 1SD, +1SD). Enric Junqu de Fortuny (enric.junquedefortuny@nyu.edu) is an assistant professor of information systems and business analytics at NYU Shanghai, 1555 Century Ave, Pudong, Shanghai 200122, China. Bivariate Analysis & Perceptual Mapping in Marketing Research. Value Expressive Reference Group Influence - Monash Business School Consumer influencers have varied audiences, both in number and type, and even consumers with less than 10,000 followers on social media (e.g., micro-influencers) are now tapped to support brands. Given the rise of this practice and consumers use of social media, the relationships between brands and consumer influencers and how these relationships impact the brands themselves are an important facet of understanding the future of consumerbrand relationships. The term consumer buying refers to the process of selecting, buying and consuming products for the satisfaction of a customers wants. Since brand reference group associations have also been traditionally described in terms of stereotyping (as described in the next section), we explore the extension of key insights from existing research on stereotype change. - Definition & Theories, Market Development: Examples, Definition & Process, Production Orientation: Definition & Examples, Reference Groups in Marketing: Definition, Types & Examples, Product Development and Retailing: Homework Help, Product Distribution & Supply Chain Management: Homework Help, Pricing Strategy in Marketing: Homework Help, Implications of Information Technology: Homework Help, Money and Financial Institutions: Homework Help, Information Systems and Computer Applications: Certificate Program, Introduction to Business: Certificate Program, Introduction to Business Law: Certificate Program, Principles of Macroeconomics: Certificate Program, Reference Group in Sociology: Definition, Examples & Types, Business Education Publications, Organizations & Trends, Identifying Cause & Effect in Historical Documents, Using & Analyzing Graphs to Support an Essay, What is Phantom Unemployment? That is, one tends to avoid products and activities used by dissociative reference groups. Consumers may be influenced not only by their own membership groups but also by reference groups of which they wish to be a part. A reference group helps shape a person's attitudes and behaviours. This mechanism yields especially interesting implications once we begin to consider highly atypical individuals, which can lead to subtyping. If an individual is considered to be too atypical, they may be seen as exceptions to the rule, therefore failing to change ideas about the groups perceived heterogeneity due to appearing less relevant to the group. The degree of desirability of group membership is negative. Reference groups are groups of people that can influence others in many different ways. Not found what you are looking for? Reference groups are important in social science research, but they also matter to marketing professionals who can use them to understand and predict consumer behaviors. Required fields are marked *. Additional analysis revealed similar indirect effects for fashion brands with strong group associations, for the embedding variation variable (effect = .0016, SE = .0004, confidence interval: LLCI = .0025, ULCI = .0008 at 95% significance level) and the number of clusters mentioned (effect = .0067, SE = .0025, confidence interval: LLCI = .0121, ULCI = .0022 at 95% significance level). Most people confuse this influence with peer pressure. DISTRIBUTION OF INFLUENCERS BY FOLLOWING*. Future research on how reference group associations are shaped can explore variations across different types of consumers. This possibility is especially promising for marketing, given the importance that has traditionally been assigned to developing and maintaining associations with the right type of consumer (Englis and Solomon 1996, 1997). Answered: What is a reference group? Describe | bartleby This website helped me pass! Also, our moderation results suggest that this relationship remained true across varying levels of subjective (perceived commercial orientation and ratings of brand sponsorship) and objective (likes on the post, degree of positivity in the text) post characteristics. To do so, we extended previous analyses via a mediation analysis, by examining whether influencer typicality affects a brands perceived homogeneity among consumers, bringing to mind stronger reference group associations, which subsequently influences the tightness among the descriptors participants provided (e.g., embedding variation and number of clusters). A key variable affecting stereotype change is the perceived typicality of the person relative to their group (Hewstone et al. To build mechanistic insights regarding how brands can come to hold associations with specific types of people, we consider how brands might be stereotyped by consumers (Grubb and Hupp 1968; Levy 1959; Sirgy 1982). What is reference marketing and when do you need it? - Livingstone Specifically, we present an approach for analyzing reference groups associations using words and phrases that are freely provided by consumers to describe brands. Common words reflecting the athlete category include athlete, runner, jock, sportsman, and competitive. We did not find evidence that these posts (in aggregate) affected perceived homogeneity ( = .023, t = 1.37, p = .171) or strength of associations ( = .003, t = .25, p = .802), relative to our control survey data. Our main findings suggest that when influencers post on social media, their perceived typicality for the brand can shift perceptions regarding the homogeneity of a brands consumers, ultimately strengthening or changing the groups that come to mind when people think of the brand. 1995). First, we found that typicality is associated with a brands perceived homogeneity ( = .083, t=4.78, p < .001), and that this relationship is indeed quadratic ( = .074, t=9.30, p < .001). While recent research in marketing has leveraged an embedding approach to analyze consumer word-of-mouth (Berman et al. Early American sociologist Charles Horton Cooley introduced the concepts of primary and secondary groups in his 1909 book Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind. Cooley was interested in how people develop a sense of self and identity through their relationships and interactions with others. Specifically, as described in the Linguistic Features section, for each participant, we computed two measures capturing the tightness of reference group associations. Finally, might the relationship among conceptual variables differ for newer brands, where ideas surrounding the brands typical consumer might be unclear? I highly recommend you use this site! The term reference group, first coined by the sociologist Hebert Hyman (1942), refers to any group that someone uses as a point of comparison in the process of their self-appraisal. Ginosar, Zvi and Yaacov Trope (1980), The Effects of Base Rates and Individuating Information on Judgments About Another Person, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 16 (3), 22842. Following prior empirical work (Netzer et al. While prototypical individuals strengthen existing stereotypes (e.g., a professor who is a nerd), atypical individuals may be able to change stereotypes (e.g., a professor who is a DJ). This language can be clustered via ConceptNet embedding scores to make sense of the interrelationship among such words. one of three types of influence (with comparative influence and normative influence) exerted on consumers by reference groups; informational influence occurs when the group is the source of information about products and brands. This means that understanding the influence of reference groups on consumer buying is beneficial to any business. Reference groups are groups (social groups, work groups, family, or close friends) a consumer identifies with and may want to join. Reference groups consist of members of the public from a representative range of ages, races, genders and a range of other demographic factors. We sought to identify influencer posts about brands that had received more social media exposure (and thus might be more significant for a brand) and contained information that could shape reference groups associations for a brand. However, for low levels of typicality (1SD), the indirect effect failed to reach significance ( = .003, 95% CI = [0.011, 0.004]). According to this perspective, ingroupoutgroup differentiation provides a basis for assigning meaning and structure to otherwise ambiguous social information and provides the individual with guidance and rules for social behavior and decision making. lessons in math, English, science, history, and more. I)Primary and secondary reference groups in consumer buying, II)Formal and informal reference groupsin consumer buying, III) Membership and symbolic referencegroupsin consumer buying, What is Buying Pattern Analysis? The ideology of the group is its common ideas, attitudes, and goals. It is a group that serves as a reference point for an individual for his/her beliefs, attitude and behaviour. Individuals may be influenced by the groups of which they are members. 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In terms of mechanism, research suggests that exposure to atypical individuals can cause stereotype change via subgrouping (Hewstone and Hamberger 2000; Maurer et al. a social group with two members, most meaningful of our social bonds, characterized by instability. Note that the influence in question is entirely different from peer influence. A reference group is the group whose perspective we consider. While these groups are given one name; we need to know that as consumers our purchasing experiences differ a lot. Through conventional approaches, perception change researchers are often required to specify the one or two group associations that are being changed (e.g., how intelligent is this group) when surveying participants, thus limiting the range of associations that can be studied and potentially biasing participants toward associations they might not have otherwise had. 2017; Marwick 2015; Senft 2013). In addition to exploring underlying mechanisms for brand reference group associations, we also explore how influencers impact reference group associations in part via a text analytic approach. Strong brand associations can also improve the likelihood that brands are accessible in memory (Keller 1993), and predict key variables such as brand rating, liking, and purchase intent (Dillon et al. Overall, this supplementary analysis provides support for the idea that influencer typicality tightens linguistic brand associations. (, Berman Ron, Melumad Shiri, Humphrey Colman, Meyer Robert (, Bridges Sheri, Keller Kevin Lane, Sood Sanjay (, Chan Cindy, Berger Jonah, Van Boven Leaf (, Dillon William R., Madden Thomas J., Kirmani Amna, Mukherjee Soumen (, Ding Keyan, Ma Kede, Wang Shiqi, Simoncelli Eero P. (, Escalas Jennifer Edson, Bettman James R. (, Forscher Patrick, Lai Calvin, Axt Jordan, Ebersole Charles, Herman Michelle, Devine Patricia, Nosek Brian (, Fournier Susan, Solomon Michael R., Englis Basil G. (, Garg Nikhil, Schiebinger Londa, Jurafsky Dan, Zou James (. In sociology and social psychology, an in-group is a social group to which a person psychologically identifies as being a member. The many types of reference groups include formal, informal, primary, secondary, membership, aspirational, and dissociative. Although much has been learned about the ways in which consumers respond psychologically to brands and products with both positive and negative reference group associations, less is known about how exactly brands acquire meanings and develop particular associations with specific reference groups. A normative reference group includes individuals or groups that you directly interact with that influence your norms, attitudes, values and behavior. A membership reference group is one to which a person belongs or qualifies for membership. Fraternities, sororities, sports teams, and juvenile gangs are examples of in-groups. Particularly, a venerable body of work on reference group associations has emerged (Burnkrant and Cousineau 1975; Childers and Rao 1992; Escalas and Bettman 2003, 2005; Park and Lessig 1977). In other words, for participants who felt more similar to the influencer, perceptions of influencer typicality, brand homogeneity, and reference group associations were more loosely coupled. Hewstone Miles, Hassebrauck Manfred, Wirth Andrea, Waenke Michaela (, Hughes Christian, Swaminathan Vanitha, Brooks Gillian (, Jones Christopher R.M., Fazio Russell. First, to construct a measure of embedding variation reflecting a participants tightness of reference group perceptions, we average a participants semantic vectors, capturing the persons mean reference group associations for a given brand. 1SD, +1SD). What are reference groups examples? - Studybuff.com It stands to reason, then, that businesses will market goods and services based on the traits of those with whom we share our lives. Which of the following is a characteristic of groups? Peer pressure certainly can be a negative, but it also can be a positive. In short, via these text-based measures, we supplement our analyses and explore the effects of influencer content on the tightness of brand reference group associations. Marketing professor Lars Perner of the University of Southern California contends that three factors determine identification with a reference group. As a result, we were able to bypass the limits faced by conventional approaches to studying perception change, which typically must specify the dimension (e.g., perceived intelligence) that is potentially being changed in order to utilize Likert scale-style measurements. In the era of social media, where consumers are increasingly empowered to broadcast their personalities to millions around the world, the topic of reference group associations has never been more relevant and important for marketing. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide, This PDF is available to Subscribers Only. Therefore, these specific reference groups do influence how customers purchase and make buying decisions. 2019 for a meta-analysis). 6.1E: Reference Groups - Social Sci LibreTexts Skip to main content A reference group is a collection of people that we use as a standard of comparison for ourselves regardless of whether we are part of that group. What a Reference Group Is in Marketing - LiveAbout Types of Groups Reference groups can be categorized in many ways. Not many people accept the fact that they conform to the desires of others. For example, according to role theory (Solomon 1983), these symbolic meanings can include ideas about certain social roles and the types of people who use these products and brands. Differing from the mega-celebrities explored in previous marketing research (McCracken 1989), consumer influencers in digital environments can be any real person who uses digital platforms for self-promotion (Fournier and Eckhardt 2019). 2018) for the positioning of the words to maximally preserve the meaning of distance when going from the 300-dimensional embedded space to the 2D representation. The Influence of Dissociative Reference Groups on Consumer Preferences, Are All Out-Groups Created Equal? Jeffrey K Lee , Enric Junqu de Fortuny, Influencer-Generated Reference Groups, Journal of Consumer Research, Volume 49, Issue 1, June 2022, Pages 2545, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucab056. Out-group members are disconnected and not fully engaged with the groups goals. A limitation of our dataset is that it also does not measure changes in reference group associations across time, instead capturing a snapshot in group associations after participants are exposed to influencer stimuli or not. A reference group is a group to which an individual or another group is compared, used by sociologists in reference to any group that is used by an individual as a standard for evaluating themselves and their own behavior. See table 1 for statistics. Celebrity product endorsements are a common strategy used to sell products. Consumer buying involves various processes. This work shows how associations with various types of consumers can affect choices made regarding a product or brand. Jak moemy promowa marketing midzynarodowy? A recent meta-analysis of the stereotype change literature suggests that while stereotypes can be resistant to change, they are indeed malleable and can be strengthened or weakened (Forscher et al. Its like a teacher waved a magic wand and did the work for me. All rights reserved. They set the levels of lifestyle, purchasing patterns, etc. Given that much stereotype change research has focused on situations in which pre-existing associations are held about certain social groups, stereotype change may be described in terms of the weakening of these pre-existing associations or biases (Forscher et al. One possible explanation is that perceived similarity to others triggers less stereotypic processing of information (Koomen and Dijker 1997), such that for individuals who felt similar to an influencer, the reinforcement of brand homogeneity, and reference group associations did not happen as readily. More generally, the choice to engage with typical versus atypical influencers likely depends on whether the brand wishes to strengthen or change existing associations. In subsequent sections, we consider the role of all of these variables as covariates or moderators in our analyses. Nonetheless, the general possibility that influencers can play in shaping the degree and nature of brand associations may have numerous important downstream consequences for brands. Specifically, in a large-scale survey involving over 5,000 participants, we collected open-ended reference group associations for 25 major brands after participants were exposed to Instagram posts made by social media influencers about these brands. We observed significant indirect effects across moderate (+0SD, = .036, 95% CI = [0.027, 0.045]) and high levels of typicality (+1SD, = .069, 95% CI = [0.052, 0.090]). While brands produce their own content on these platforms, one promising strategy that has emerged involves targeting consumer influencers to produce user-generated content about the brand (Mediakix 2018). Again, consumers are often influenced by other people. From a managerial perspective, the preferred degree of influencer typicality might vary based on the goals of the marketing campaign. Local perturbations to the positions were applied to enhance legibility of the words. This possibility is reflected in initiatives such as Doves Real Beauty campaign, where consistent advertising with a diverse range of women ultimately broadened the audience for the brand (Millard 2009). Belonging to a reference group can be by choice, by necessity, or simply by birth. Opinion leaders are people who influence others. Finally, we asked participants questions to explore the role of alternative variables as important covariates and moderators (see web appendix C for measures and adaptations for control survey participants). Figure5d provides partial versions of the full maps for Nike and Coca-Cola, which can be found in web appendix I. As an example, the words running, chic, and wealthy belong to the athlete, fashionable, and rich clusters, respectively. Aspirational Group - Monash Business School A group that serves as a negative (unattractive) reference point can influence CB. Similarly, a bootstrap confidence interval suggested mediation whereby typical influencers increased perceptions of homogeneity, once again strengthening reference group associations and ultimately reducing the number of clusters participants described for the brand (effect = .0054, SE = .0022, confidence interval: LLCI = .0098, ULCI = .0013 at 95% significance level). The amount of peer pressure is visible in all circles as a larger percentage of individuals often want to belong. The desire of people to fit-in in a particular society or group is the primary buying decision for many consumers. This lack of mediation suggests that the most atypical influencers might strengthen associations in ways other than by causing participants to conclude that a brands consumers are homogenous. Also, there was an effect of age on participants ratings of a brands homogeneity ( = .039, t=2.15, p = .032) and strength of group associations ( = .009, t=6.87, p < .001), consistent with prior findings that brand stereotypes might increase with age (Chaplin and Lowrey 2010). Consistent with prior research (Belk et al. However, for low levels of typicality (1SD), the indirect effect failed to reach significance ( = .002, 95% CI = [0.006, 0.010]). Three types of reference group influences are studied-informational, value expressive and utilitarian. Out-groups form when people disagree with the social, political, or ethical positions of the group. Subsequently, we measured other variables from our conceptual model. Through a survey in which over 5,000 participants provided open-ended reference group associations for 25 major brands, the authors find that social media influencers can either strengthen or change brand reference group associations. (B) EMBEDDING VARIATION. Consumer Reference Groups: Types & Examples - Study.com Secondary reference groups are those with which an individual interacts only occasionally and does not consider their opinion very important. To this end, we employed a measure from Maurer, Park, and Rothbart (1995), asking how similar to each other are people who use this brand (1=Extremely dissimilar, 7=Extremely similar). Similarly, marketers may create advertising that implies that your normative reference group prefers a particular product or service. Curtis P. Haugtvedt, Paul M. Herr and Frank R. 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This research could also examine whether negative (relative to positive) associations are more difficult to change over time, as suggested by stereotype change research (Lai and Banaji 2020; Stephan 1985). Additionally, we construct a second linguistic measure of the participants tightness of brand associations. People can have many different reference groups in different - Definition & Overview, Working Scholars Bringing Tuition-Free College to the Community. Definition, Examples and Importance, What is Owned Media? 2019; Wang, Xiong, and Yang 2019). Jeffrey K. Lee was supported by NYU Shanghai as a Visiting Scholar in the completion of this work. By clicking Accept All Cookies, you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts.