Self-love is what we each and every one of us experience and by what we are
‘naturally’ guided in what we do. We all wish pleasures and we all want to avoid pain; but self-love is not guaranteed to achieve what it is about, unless enlightened.
Bauman, 1993: 27
In order to understand how to arrive at a framework for explaining the negotiation of trade-offs, it will be necessary to return to the key concepts highlighted in the previous chapter, and to consider initially the psychological perspective encountered in the previous chapter.
Trade-offs have been conceptualised in the ethical consumption literature in different ways, although the analytic device to understand the trade-off has been the subject of little attention. Devinney et al. (2010) have perhaps applied the most focus by applying a
‘best-worst’ (BW) experiment in which consumers are asked to rate the relative
importance of objects of (conflicting) perceptual difference, thus asking respondents to rate the trade-off. However, this study only analysed the trade-offs between different areas of social, economic and political concern, and so was limited in understanding the totality of consumption experience. In some studies they are positioned as being negative balances of positive outcomes. For example, Moraes et al., 2010 highlight the benefits experienced by participants in new consumption communities (personal benefits such as personal development, spiritual benefits and, control/empowerment, social benefits such as a sense of community, and environmental benefits), and position the
‘trade-offs’ as being investments of time, convenience and effort, group conflicts, and expense. Likewise, Schröder and McEachren find value conflicts (2004) relating to guilt and breaking ethical rules. Others have examined (mainly) benefits against only
(financial) cost (Lim et al., 2014). Shaw et al. (2015) also denote trade-offs as largely rational, cognitive choices, citing trading off self-interest with regard for others, or
conflicts between deontological (slow, and formed through culture and experience) and teleological (individual reflection) evaluations. Their rational choice interpretation accommodates more traditional notions of utility, such as price, and highlight barriers to enaction being knowledge, or the postmodern view espoused earlier surrounding
complexities attitudes and identities.
The trade-offs referred to in these studies imply that the consumer is engaged in an act of preferential judgement; that multiple factors are compared to arrive at a course of action which balance the relative importance of both the benefits and sacrifices of engaging in an act. This balancing of benefit and sacrifice has been one of the central strands within the work on the concept of value (Ng and Smith, 2012; Sanchez et al., 2009), itself considered to be one of (if not the) most fundamental concepts within the concept of marketing (Vargo and Lusch, 2012; Gallarza et al., 2011; Holbrook, 1994). However, there are two issues with this notion of trade-offs. Firstly, as Painter-Morland (2011) notes, the rationality employed in such utilitarian models is based on a number of spurious
principles, including commensurability (the notion that the things to be valued can be measured on a single scale); aggregation (weighing up the various factors); and maximisation (the effort to arrive at the optimum result). Whilst it is likely that issues such as scaling and measurement are likely to be impossible, these principles also take no account of the personal and contextual factors that may inform how they experience value.
Secondly, Vargo and Lusch (2012) note that value is contextually specific and contingent on the availability and integration of other resources; that is, that value is determined (or perhaps created) through integrative practices which are not ‘simple’ cognitive trade-offs, but embedded within the structures within which ‘actors’ exist, which themselves are both enabling and constraining. Indeed, practice is central to the debate, and it was argued previously that changing behaviours can mean changing ingrained and long-standing habits. With regard to the retail clothing industry, the importance of habits and practice in consumption has started to emerge (Michaelidou and Dibb, 2009; Dawes, 2009; Carpenter and Fairhurst, 2005; Wood, 2004), but more significantly, Ng and Smith (2012) argue for a view of value which is characterised by a: “…phenomenological practice of value creation for outcomes” (p232); that is, it is not ‘perceived’, but
performed, with the object (in this case clothing) becoming an inherent element of the individual’s social and cultural practices (the connection of value and practice will be revisited shortly). They argue that this phenomenological view relates also to ethical and moral dimensions of value as the ‘goodness’ of the object is enacted by individuals and their values in their social and cultural practices; it is this perspective, therefore, which renders rational, cognitive approaches unlikely.
Therefore, as previously argued, value is likely to be significantly influenced by an
individual’s identity and values; as Lages and Fernandes (2005) point out, one of the most powerful means of understanding consumer decisions, choices and opinions is through understanding values systems. However, whilst Rokeach (1973) claims values are
‘relatively enduring’, there is growing evidence that whilst this may be true to some extent, as Firat and Venkatesh (1995) argue, values do change over time and ‘postmodern consumers’ may possess multiple value systems under which different emphases may be placed on different values in different contexts (although Brown, 2006, claims that this phenomenon is under-investigated). There are links here between the ethical obligation and the pluralism discussed earlier; again the importance of context was highlighted as being crucial, and Ng and Smith (2012) note that context is an aspect of value critical to its understanding.
An examination of the concept of value must therefore be undertaken in greater detail in relation to the notion of trade-offs; as noted by Holbrook (1994), the theory of value (known as axiology) is a critical perspective for consumer researchers, and whilst many studies (such as those examined in the previous chapter) have examined what is valued by consumers and their values, few studies have sought to understand how consumers evaluate value.
Customer Value
Khalifa (2004) notes that value can broadly be clustered around three main categories:
shareholder value, stakeholder value and customer value. This thesis is primarily
concerned with the latter; ‘value’ as it is applied here relates to a demand-side definition (or the value the customer receives, or expects to receive) as opposed to the value
derived from customers by organisations (Woodruff, 1997), although it should be noted that Khalifa points out that increased shareholder value is likely to occur for
organisations who are able to provide superior customer value, and these categories are likely to be linked (Martelo-Landroguez et al., 2015). Woodruff (1997) notes that value is something which is perceived by customers rather than objectively determined by
suppliers. Vargo and Lusch (2004) further this to argue that an organisation can only offer
‘value propositions’; the term proposition is significant in emphasising that value is not only determined by, but also co-created by customers in an emergent process which occurs through a relationship. Woodall (2003) terms this concept ‘value for the customer’, but recognises that there are variations in the literature in its terminology (Sanchez and Iniesta, 2007, refer to the concept as ‘perceived value’) and application in broader and marketing-specific discourses. For example, value has applications in economics from exchange, use and utilitarian perspectives, and from more abstract philosophical
perspectives related to personal evaluations. Consequently, as previously noted, customer value is a concept which is of increasing value to those involved in the study and practice of marketing due to this link between consumer behaviour and marketing strategy (that is, its correlation with consumer evaluations, behavioural intentions and repeat purchase) (Overby et al., 2004). Indeed, it is commonly recognised that value is an evaluative
judgement (Holbrook, 1994) which is the result of a trade-off between benefits and sacrifices (Payne and Holt, 2001, Sanchez and Iniesta, 2007), and an interaction between the consumer and the product/service (Sanchez and Iniesta, 2006). However, it is argued by many that consumer value research is still in its early stages of development and is not adequately conceptualised, or even often misunderstood (Payne and Holt, 2001; Khalifa, 2004; Sanchez et al., 2009, Boksberger and Melsen, 2011). However, this section will aim to give an overview of current thinking and consider how the concept of value might provide insight into the trade-offs it is claimed exist in ethical consumption.
A number of reviews of the literature in relation to customer value have recently sought to synthesise the range of academic work which attempt to define and conceptualise the concept (Ng and Smith, 2012; Boksberger and Melsen, 2011; Gallarza et al., 2011; Sanchez et al., 2009; Sanchez and Iniesta, 2006 & 2007; Khalifa, 2004; Woodall, 2003). It is not the purpose of this thesis to synthesise new directions for value as a concept in itself, and given the range of perspectives highlighted by the existing reviews of the literature these
will be critiqued as the primary form of analysis, examining original key works in the field where appropriate. Of course, each of these reviews also provide their own contribution to the theory of value.
Sanchez et al. (2009) argue that marketing academics have largely treated value as a
‘cognitive’ concept (treating value as noted above as a conscious trade-off between benefits and sacrifices); they suggest that this is largely a unidimensional approach, in which value can be measured by a set of self-reported items relating to consumer
perceptions of value (which tend to be cognitive and utilitarian). They note that a second group of researchers have adopted a wider multidimensional approach in which value is treated as a much more complex phenomenon consisting of a number of interrelated dimensions, which may (but not necessarily) also be cognitive and utilitarian in nature.
The latter case is more likely as previously discussed, but this perhaps presents a narrow view of unidimensionality. Khalifa (2004) identifies three categories of customer value;
value components models (essentially based around product features), utilitarian models (benefit versus cost models) and means-end models (where value is defined in terms of personal values, or personal teleological structures). The first of these three is perhaps overlooked by Sanchez et al. (2009) to some degree, but value components models and utilitarian models correspond to their conception of multidimensional approaches, whereas means-end models perhaps correspond more to the unidimensional models identified by Sanchez et al. in which more complex processes are engaged to arrive at an overall perception of value (and which is perhaps, therefore counter-intuitively infinitely dimensional). Similarly, Boksberger and Melsen (2011) identify two broad perspectives on value; the utilitarian perspective (as with the cognitive concept) and the behavioural perspective. Alternatively, Woodall (2003) argues there are essentially five interpretations of value: use, utilitarian, and human (all subject-based) and exchange and intrinsic
(object-based). The subject/object distinction is important (Walker et al., 2006), although as Woodall (2003) notes, the subject and object are inextricably connected and value can only be evaluated at their intersection, but valued differently and in different ways at different times. This would correspond with a pluralistic perspective on value in which different factors would be relevant in the evaluation of value depending on the specific situation; sometimes consistent and sometimes contradictory. The implication for
understanding value in the context of this thesis will be discussed in further detail in due
course. However, before doing so it will be useful in terms of understanding value from a moral perspective to examine one of the most widely cited typologies of value; that of Holbrook (1994).
Value as Interrelated Dimensions: Holbrook’s Typology of Value
Perhaps the most prominent axiological analysis in the context of consumer value was undertaken by Holbrook (1994), who presents a metanormative analysis of (an
examination of the nature of) value. Holbrook argues that value is an interactive,
relativistic preference experience: interactive as it involves the valuation by a subject of an object, where the value is a property of an object, but relative to a subject). That is, value can only be derived from an interaction between consumer and product/service, which is reflected in the notion of its co-creation as highlighted earlier; relativistic as value is comparative (in relation to another object), personal and situational. The act of
‘preferring’ something is linked here to the values discussed earlier in terms of guiding principles), and the experiential perspective relates to the value derived from the consumption experience (that is, value in consumer behaviour does not reside in the object or in possession of the object, but the experience derived from it, as also argued by Vargo and Lusch, 2004). As Smith, 1999 notes, the act of purchase is rarely an end in itself, but a means of gaining experiences derived from the product). Following this, Holbrook proposes a typology of value to encompass all of its potential roles:
Figure 11: A typology of value in the consumption experience
Extrinsic Intrinsic
Self-Oriented Active Efficiency Play
Reactive Excellence Esthetics
Other Oriented Active Politics Morality
Reactive Esteem Spirituality
(Source: Holbrook , 1994: 45).
Extrinsic value is associated with instrumental values and utility; the use derived from a thing or action. Intrinsic value is derived from appreciation ‘for its own sake’; that
pleasurable experiences are ‘worth having’ for themselves. Self-oriented values are those directed towards self-interest, whereas ‘other oriented’ are those directed towards others.
Active value arises from the subject’s manipulation of the environment by an object (for example playing a video game). Reactive value occurs when the subject allows the object
to act upon it. This typology results in eight types of value as shown in figure 11. Smith (1999) acknowledges the contribution of the typology, but recognises that there may be additional dimensions to the three posited by Holbrook, for example affective, economic or tangible/intangible in addition to the extrinsic/intrinsic, self/other and active/reactive dimensions identified. Furthermore, as the practice perspective has previously highlighted, there may also be intuitive dimensions to value. Indeed, other researchers have provided slightly different frameworks along similar lines – for example Rintamaki et al. (2007) provide a framework consisting of four value dimensions: economic value, functional value, emotional value and symbolic value, and suggest that the key dimensions of customer value can be identified hierarchically, and principally from one or two of these
perspectives. Smith (1999), however, also notes that there is uncertainty regarding the antecedents and consequences of such dimensions. The implications of this will be
discussed in due course. Before doing so, the most pertinent value in relation to this thesis, morality, will be further considered.
Morality as a Consumer Value
Whilst Holbrook (1994) identifies morality as a form of value which is derived from consumption, he warns that the types of value do not provide neat distinctions, and similarly to the nature of consumption experience discussed earlier any consumption experience is likely to involve more than one type of value simultaneously. Whilst Holbrook suggests this may be complementary (for example, a building can provide both aesthetic and utilitarian value at the same time), it may be that these forms of value can also compete; for example a clothing product which provides moral and aesthetic value may not be available, so one ‘type’ of value would have to be chosen over the other. It is this which makes the pluralistic perspective necessary; they cannot be accounted for on a single scale and are reflected in the trade-offs made by consumers under this perspective.
Whilst it should be perhaps recognised that from an egoist perspective morality may well be considered to be self-oriented, Holbrook sees it as other-oriented and argues that once a moral act stops being an end in itself it takes some other form of value. It is therefore intrinsically motivated and also active. He also adopts a largely deontological perspective in his definition of ethics. Whilst the role of self-identity discussed previously may
support this intrinsic view, Smith (1999) advises caution, noting that acts may never be, or
known to be, entirely without self-interest and the role of ethical obligation also
discussed earlier may perhaps support this view to some degree. He therefore argues that Holbrook’s view is too narrow and proposes a broader, alternative conceptualisation of ethics as (derived) consumer value which embraces the notion that it arises: “…in a consumption experience when the individual engages in an affirmative act of goodness, promoting one or more moral values for the well-being of others and for reasons of enlightened self-interest.” (Smith, 1999: 156). This ‘enlightened self-interest’ attempts to resolve the problems with altruism as highlighted by Smith, and recognises that :
“…values possess legitimacy beyond the boundaries of simple self-interest.” (Donaldson, in Smith , 1999: 156). Smith’s discussion of morality as a consumer value as proposed in Holbrook’s typology (that is, derived through consumption) supports the previous
arguments for the complexity inherent in both ethics and consumer decision making, and reiterates the problems presented when competing or conflicting values may be present in a consumption experience. Indeed, Brown (1999: 162) argues that matrix typologies are: “…undeniably arbitrary, authoritarian, restrictive, repressive, mechanistic, methodical, utilitarian, unimaginative, inflexible [and] intolerable”, and that: “…the butterfly of value is killed in the very act of pinning it to the scholarly display board” (p164). The pluralist perspective argued in chapter two would support this view, meaning that value is perhaps best viewed as an aggregation (Woodall, 2003); something which emerges as a ‘whole’, which may be more likely to be intuitively stated and therefore arguably more authentic.
Furthermore, Brown asserts the ultimate arbitrariness of value; he argues that one set of values should not be replaced with another, but one must: “…question the value of the values we value.” (p164).
Holbrook (1994) therefore argues that behaving ethically can provide value to consumers, and morality may be one form of value derived from a consumption experience. However, as previously noted it could be questioned whether morality can be derived via
consumption, or whether morality drives consumption as a human value. As Smith (1999) and Brown (1999) suggest, behaving ethically might be better considered as providing value in ways which might be more integrative; for example, as the discussion around
‘enlightened self-interest’ demonstrates, acting ethically could provide personal value, or social value through an identification within a wider community of practice as highlighted in Moraes’ (2012) study discussed previously. Also, whilst understanding morality as value
in this way assists in conceptualising this type of value (that is what value is derived), it says nothing about how value might be evaluated by the consumer. It is arguably this which is central to understanding value’s role in consumer behaviour. The following section will therefore examine what the value literature can contribute to the notion of the ‘trade-off’.
Value and Trade-Offs
As previously noted, many of the studies relating to ethical consumption refer to the trade-offs it is claimed consumers make as largely cognitive, utilitarian evaluations, similar to those put forwards in the value literature. For example, Sanchez and Iniesta (2007) argue that value perceived as a trade-off between benefit and sacrifice is naturally utilitarian, but that this view fails to account for the complexity inherent in value
perceptions which include intrinsic, intangible and emotional factors, although as they point out, this makes the concept ambiguous. For example, they note that if value is perceived as utilitarian and hedonic, an affective component should also be included.
However, it could be argued that there is no reason that this affective component cannot be conceptualised as a benefit if present or sacrifice if absent. The concept of a sacrifice in itself could be seen as counter to the pluralist and pragmatist perspectives put forward
However, it could be argued that there is no reason that this affective component cannot be conceptualised as a benefit if present or sacrifice if absent. The concept of a sacrifice in itself could be seen as counter to the pluralist and pragmatist perspectives put forward