CULTURED MINDS

CATEGORISATION

 

Categorisation is a useful tool that humans use in order to make sense of the vast quantities of information encountered every day. Where a person lies on the spectrum of analytic/holistic thinking can provide useful predictions about the mental categories and sorting rules they favour. In turn this affects how they relate to advertising, brands and brand extensions. 

 

Product Category 

A comparison of advertisement tactics around the world points to preferences for analytic vs holistic processing. US ads emphasise product merit and employ more hard sell tactics - these appeal to a more logical, analytical thinking style, whilst Chinese ads are more likely to incorporate group consensus and values such as respect for the elderly; a more context-based approach. However, these findings are more pronounced in certain product categories. For example, ads for pharmaceutical products in the US tend to emphasise speed and efficiency of the drug whereas Chinese ones focus on oneness with nature (inner harmony). But all advertisements for travel used similar tactics - the authors speculate that travel is one consumption category where ‘consumer psychology and cultural values are relatively universal.’ (Lin, 2001). 

 

 

Features used to group categories

Culture influences which kinds of features people use to bind categories together. (Ames & Knowles, 2000). For example, (Medin, Wattenmaker & Hampson,1987) distinguished between two broadly used rules for categorising objects: Natural Categories (e.g family) share many properties but contain no singly necessary property and Group Categories (e.g sports team) are created based on a unidimensional sorting rule. The distinction bears a striking resemblance to that made by (Oyserman, 2002) between relational-collectivistic cultures (e.g China), where one’s in-group is based on family, and the group-collectivistic (e.g US) where one’s in-group is more likely to be artificially-created: members are different on a number of dimensions but share one ‘rule’ in common (e.g lacrosse team). 

 

Findings in (Chiu, 1972) support this idea by showing that Chinese children prefer to group objects according to a relational-contextual style; so the word WOMAN was said to be most related to CHILD since a woman takes care of children. Meanwhile US children preferred rule-based categorisation such as putting WOMAN with MAN since “both are grown-ups”.

 

Another way to group objects/events is into ‘goal-based’ categories where members serve a common goal e.g pencils and calculators, despite sharing few features, could both be grouped into the category “things to take to a math exam.” Researchers say these categories are highly susceptible to cultural influence, since “cultures undeniably shape the goals adopted by their members”. They point out that ‘things to take to a math exam’ is a coherent category for Western teenagers, but perhaps not for members of rural societies where math exams are not a goal. (Ames & Knowles, 2000)

 

 

Brand Extensions

Brand extensions that fit well with the parent brand get more positive evaluations (see Keller, 2002; Kim, Park & Kim, 2014). A way of assessing this ‘fit’ is to assess whether the brand extension falls within the same mental category as the parent brand. So brand-extension opinions will depend on individuals’ sorting rules and category definitions, and these vary systematically across cultures. 

 

In particular, (Ahluwalia, 2008) posit that those with a dominant interdependent self-construal (who are therefore more likely to perceive things holistically) see greater fit between a brand and its extensions. (Monga & John, 2004; 2007) also proposed that Easterners and Westerners judge brand extension fit differently. They observed that people from Eastern cultures (e.g., Indians) perceive poor-fitting brand extensions of a known brand (e.g., a cabinet made by Kodak) more favourably than Western consumers. When confronted with a ‘low-fit’ brand extension Asians were more likely than Americans to believe it was of high quality, as long as it was marketed by a large firm. (Han & Schmitt, 1996)