Will the Real Consumer Activist Please Stand Up: An Examination of Consumers’ Opinions about Marketing Practices

The topic of consumerism, while frequently discussed in the media, has only recently been addressed by formal market research 1, 4. Are there groups of people with essentially similar attitudes toward business practices? How large are these groups, and do the relative strengths of their feelings about marketing practices vary from one group to the next? If a consumer activist group exists, what other feelings, predispositions, and behavior help differentiate that group from more passive, tolerant, or satisfied people? In November and December of 1970, a large consumer survey was completed at Purdue University by Pessemier, DeBruicker, and Hustad in which extensive activity and attitude measures were obtained for 912 husband and wife pairs. The sample was a representative demographic cross section of Lafayette, Indiana, an upscale midwestern industrial community. The analysis reported in this article is based upon the data provided by the 912 women in the survey. In addition to standard socioeconomic data, product usage rate data, and other traditional measures, the subjects provided detailed records of their attitudes and activities relating to six product categories, a wide range of media and communication elements, and an extensive set of topics which were less product-and-media specific. A detailed discussion of the design, the instruments employed, and the reliability of the data is provided in 5. The data most central to the questions raised by this article were obtained via a series of 115 semantic differentially scaled variables spanning many dimensions of consumers' feelings toward business and marketing practices. Observations on literally hundreds of supplementary variables were obtained. Categories and listings of these supplementary data will be introduced as this analysis proceeds.