Marketing Department Research Seminars

Seminars
Marketing Department Research Seminars

Experience as Possession: A Conceptual Formulation

Presenter: Prof. Russell Belk (Schulich School of Business, York University)

Socio-technological changes brought about in the past century and a half are liquifying once solid material consumption by making it increasingly ephemeral, access-based, and dematerialized. This has significant implications for our existing notions of ownership and possession. Among the bellwether fields first detecting these changes is art. As illustrated by non-fungible tokens (NFTs), the art market has innovated in ways that suggest a new consumption, possession, and ownership paradigm where property rights like exclusivity and rivalry do not apply. We draw upon the conceptual art premise of art as idea to formulate a new concept of psychological possession: possession as an experience that is non-rivalrous and without exclusivity. In developing our concept of psychological possession, we examine minimalism including allied notions of dematerialization, virtualization, fractionalization, and ephemeralization. These processes all point to a drive toward nothingness. Rather than a nihilistic death drive, we show how this trend is toward essence, purity, and minimalism. We also contribute by enmeshing theoretical and philosophical threads from consumer research, the philosophy of arts, and aesthetics, and by presenting examples pertaining to NFTs, music, brands, and the metaverse, with implications for a new type of possession that explains new forms of consumption such as streaming, the sharing economy, and the subscription economy.

Pragmatism as a novel cultural construct

Presenter: Prof. Sharon Ng (Nanyang Business School)

Previous cross-cultural research has primarily used Hofstede’s five cultural dimensions (e.g. collectivism-individualism) to explain the behavioral differences observed in different countries. Although these dimensions have contributed much to knowledge about international marketing, they cannot explain many anomalies in global consumer patterns (e.g. a greater preference for STEM courses in Asia). This stream of research identifies idealism-pragmatism as a cultural dimension that is not captured by existing cultural values frameworks. The first part of the research aims to develop a scale to measure the pragmatism-idealism mindset. The second part of this research identifies cross-cultural differences in pragmatism and show that Asians’ higher pragmatism is partly due to a greater salience of resource scarcity, as the economic development of Asian countries is a relatively recent phenomenon compared to Western countries. Overall, our findings show that idealism and pragmatism represent a new cultural dimension that is relevant to international marketing.