Affective Responses of Low-Income Consumers To Losses of Symbolic Possessions

Informações

Código: MKT3128
Divisão: MKT - Marketing
Tema de Interesse: Tema 03 - Cultura e Consumo

Autores

Luciana Bellini Rangel (Mestr e Dout em Admin de Empresas/IAG-A Esc de Negócios da PUC-Rio – IAG/PUC-Rio - Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro) luciana.bellini@hotmail.com
Luis Fernando Hor-Meyll Alvares (Mestr e Dout em Admin de Empresas/IAG-A Esc de Negócios da PUC-Rio – IAG/PUC-Rio - Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro) hormeyll@iag.puc-rio.br
Diana Sinclair Pereira Branisso (Mestr e Dout em Admin de Empresas/IAG-A Esc de Negócios da PUC-Rio – IAG/PUC-Rio - Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro) dibranisso@yahoo.com

Resumo

During economic crises, consumers suffer significant losses that deeply affect the constitution of part of their selves. From 2014 on, Brazil faced a serious crisis and, although it is a period of individual suffering, it presented as a rare opportunity to study affective responses of low-income people, who socially ascended during a preceding period of welfare, to sudden lose symbolic possessions that identified them as members of the middle class. Such losses go beyond simple material deprivation and extend to the construction of a hardly acquired identity. The results presented suggest that affective responses to losses have close resemblance with grief phases (Kübler-Ross, 2000): denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Twelve phenomenological interviews (Thompson, Locander & Pollio, 1989) were conducted. The interviewees were consumers who had socially risen and were then hit by the economic crisis, having suffered considerable upheavals in their construction of the self. The phases of reaction to loss surfaced in the narratives of the interviewees, contributing to the understanding of how losses of symbolic possessions resemble the death of an identity, thus affecting the self. Understanding the affective responses, under Kübler-Ross’s perspective, may shed some light on a theoretical gap identified in the consumer behavior literature.

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