Exam 12: Income, Social Class, and Family Structure

Consumers who are "in the know" about valued status symbols may switch gears and deliberately seek to mock the prizing of such status symbols by avoiding them, for example, by wearing torn blue jeans, a form of consumption called:

Trisha grew up in a drug-ridden inner-city neighbourhood. Through sheer determination and intelligence, Trisha is now a medical doctor teaching on the staff of a large university hospital. Trisha is proud of what she has accomplished, but sometimes she feels like she isn't quite sure who she really is. The concept of ________ was developed to assess the impact of such inconsistencies.

Margorie takes care of her aging mother and her grown son lives at home with her. How would you characterize her?

Which sector of the population is largely responsible for fuelling Japan's luxury-goods spending?

How does social class relate to consumer behaviour in China?

The money available to a household over and above that required for a comfortable standard of living is termed:

What is consumer confidence and how does it affect spending behaviour?

Samuel would like to use occupational prestige to measure social class, but his study is international, and the prestige of occupations changes from one culture to the next.

Katrina, a new recruit for Maple Leaf Foods, is promoted very quickly over longer-term employees, and is given a parking space with the company vice presidents. This is an example of:

The concept of social class has been valuable in marketing because it tells researchers how money is spent. Unfortunately, however, social class has failed to tell marketers how much money will be spent within each class.

Young, lower-class men and women who mix track suits with flashy brands and accessories from big names such as Burberry have become known as what in the UK?

Because a person's occupation tends to be strongly linked to his or her use of leisure time, allocation of family resources, political orientation, and so on, this variable is often considered to be the single best indicator of social class.

Strategic Business Insights, the research firm that developed VALS, divides consumers into three groups on the basis of their attitudes toward luxury. Those groups are:

Veronica recently bought a new high-end BMW. One of the reasons she purchased it was because she knew other people in her neighbourhood would be jealous of her. For Veronica, the role of the BMW was:

Although members of a particular social group carry the same identity of membership, some members are better off, better liked or respected, and have more authority or power than others. The group exhibits:

In China, an economic decline is rapidly decreasing the size of the middle-class segment.

The family life cycle concept is particularly useful to marketers because:

The concept of the potlatch, the extravagant feast and display and often even the destruction of wealth or possessions (to show that one can afford to) characteristic of the Kwakiutl Indians of the Pacific Northwest, is analogous to the modern concept of:

Universally, people develop a ________ whereby they are ranked in terms of their relative standing in society.