Social meanings in Christmas consumption: an exploratory study of UK celebrants' consumption rituals

Abstract

*Although much has been written about the celebration of Christmas from a variety of perspectives, limited attention has been paid in the consumer behaviour literature to understanding the behaviours of consumers surrounding this event. Apart from insights gained from prior work on consumption rituals and meanings of festivities, our knowledge of meaning creation through Christmas consumption is partial, and written mainly from a North American perspective. Since consumer behaviour is shaped by cultural and social contexts, understanding the relationship between consumption objects and the social meanings that consumers ascribe to them is a research imperative. This paper explores the ways in which the British Christmas is consumed as a shared consumption experience, by bringing together two different approaches taken by consumer researchers and sociologists to analysing social consumption patterns. These are drawn from structuralist and post-structuralist thinking. The findings of an exploratory qualitative study are used to demonstrate how an enhanced understanding of consumption meanings associated with this particular cultural context can lead to new insights into how consumers create social meanings through special, as well as ordinary, behaviours.

Extending Holt's consuming typology to encompass subject–subject relations in consumption: lessons from pet ownership

“…Holt draws the first three of these four metaphors from the consumer research literature and uses his case study of baseball spectatorship to refine these perspectives and to identify and develop the fourth metaphor of consuming as play. His framework has been used to examine a variety of consumption contexts including financial services (Allen and McGoun 2000), wine consumption (Groves, Charters, and Reynolds 2000), and consumption at Christmas (McKechnie and Tynan 2006). In the following sections, we analyze the extent to which Holt's four metaphors and the 10 consumption practices, in which they are embedded, enhance our understanding of the experiential and socio-cultural practices surrounding pet ownership.…”

The culture of gift giving: What do consumers expect from commercial and personal contexts?

“…In this vein, many works view perceived value as multidimensional (Sheth et al ., ; Sweeney and Soutar, ). As regards gift consumption, there are also many authors who posit differing appraisals concerning the value of the gift and the act of giving (Sherry, ; Larsen and Watson, ; Babin et al ., ; McKechnie and Tynan, ).…”

The application of Memory‐Work in consumer research

“…Interpretive studies recently published in two of the leading journals in the field, the Journal of Consumer Research and the Journal of Consumer Behaviour, are mainly based on personal interviews, group interviews, some degree of ethnographic/netnographic immersion including (participant) observation, photography, collection and content analysis of material or virtual artefacts, or a mix of these methods (i.e. Davies and Fitchett, 2004;Piacentini and Mailer, 2004;Bardhi and Arnould, 2005;Johnstone and Conroy, 2005;Rosenbaum, 2005;Stevens and Maclaran, 2005;McKechnie and Tynan, 2006;Piacentini and Banister, 2006; see also the CCT studies reviewed in Arnould and Thompson, 2005).…”