Being as becoming: Play as a core concept in consumer-marketing studies
Purpose: Rejecting a stimulus-response approach to research on young persons as consumers subjected to marketing, this paper draws on phenomenology’s practices perspective. Embodied, equipped understanding is always already in use - in minimally monitored (tacit) play-like projecting, a participator...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Conference or Workshop Item |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2014
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://eprints.sunway.edu.my/230/ http://eprints.sunway.edu.my/230/1/Wilson%20Tony%20Being%20as%20becoming%20play.%20Edin%20Univ%20Being%20Becoming%20Belonging%20Conference%20Full%20Paper%20Wilson%20Choy%20Tan%20%282%29.pdf |
| Summary: | Purpose: Rejecting a stimulus-response approach to research on young persons as consumers subjected to marketing, this paper draws on phenomenology’s practices perspective. Embodied, equipped understanding is always already in use - in minimally monitored (tacit) play-like projecting, a participatory production of meaning. The paper investigates mall and media immersion as young people’s understanding-in-use: in discussion, they present visiting a massive shopping place as engaging with ludic location or a ‘second home’.
Methodology: The paper reflects on Chinese Malaysian student narratives of consumer activity. Research commences from the ‘hypothesis’ of hermeneutics - or the philosophy of understanding-in-practice(s) as play-like - tested in a
focus group. Visiting shopping mall or social media involves ‘ready-to-hand’ (little reflected on) ‘projecting’
and producing intelligibility, an integrating narrative, (dis)enabling ‘being-with-others’ (Heidegger). Talk in
discussion enables theory to be empirically extended, grounding philosophical horizons of understanding.
Findings: Our discussants’ consuming is structurally ludic, a play-like establishing of meaning from their ‘horizons of
expectation’ (Jauss), equipped, and enabling. Visiting shopping malls manages goal-oriented or teleological
meaning in embodied projecting and processing generic understanding of ‘entity’ (Heidegger) as equipment:
people gain a purchase epistemologically in material acquisitions. ‘Ludicity’ is a core concept in consumer marketing interpretation, central to the practices perspective in business, media and sociological study.
Implications: Managerial implications lie in enhancing marketing address to consumers, recognizing ludicity. The authors are now exploring understanding in visitor mall practices through the latter’s constructing cellphone images. |
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