Impact of product on the life styles of its consumers: the case of domestic liquefied petroleum gas

Abstract

Many of the impacts which marketing actions create on the environment transcend the typical marketers’ interests. These impacts are are being only recently recognized under the banner of ‘Macro-marketing’. There has been, however, no significant research effort undertaken to link marketing of ‘product’ on the ‘life style and of its consumers’, is an attempt to fill this gap. The specific product context for the research was Liquefied Petroleum Gas for domestic applications. The research is based on the primary data collected among the Allahabad city homemakers during the summer of 1979. Two distinct techniques, viz. structured questionnaire survey and Depth interviewing were used for the research. The structured instrument was administered through trained investigators to a stratified random sample of 400 homemakers by the researcher himself. The final instruments designing was preceded by an exploratory survey among Ahmedabad homemakers and another inventory building project for the cooking related attitude objects. The basic research designs used were “cross-sectional-comparisons-of-the matched samples’’ for the structured survey and ‘’after-only-single-study’’ for the qualitative survey. The findings of this research supported the conviction that the methods used in this research (which are also typical of most of the field researches in marketing) can provide answers to impact questions. The structured survey method was, however, particularly useful in exploring the primary and secondary level impacts and their extents. It was also suited for probing the life style differences associated with the product in different consumer segments. The qualitative method gave better results regarding the secondary and tertiary level impacts of the gas and the process of these impacts. Among the substantive findings, gas seems to be associated with the pushing of homemakers towards more of outdoor and fuller life. The restructuring of homemakers’ daily routine due to the release of time is more towards the self-expressive, voluntary and recreational activities. The cooking, dining and consumption practices of the family were also observed to be different in gas using homes. The gas using homemakers expressed to be feeling more self-confident efficient and relaxed after getting the gas. Gas appeared to have facilitated in the democratization of family process and increase in family’s happiness. Gas, as a technology, was also found to be making the homemakers almost addictively dependent on itself. The impact of gas has reached differentially across different consumer segments. Broadly, the consumers with greater resource endowments and lesser role commitments appear to have experienced greater changes. For the general products, this research increases the hope of getting useful results in the impact area. Some theoretical formulations for understanding the impact of general products have also been offered. At the end, policy implications for the marketers and the government have been discussed and suggestions for further researches in this area made.