Скептицизм по отношению к рынку как специфичная черта потребительского поведения представителей поколения Z

The concept of market orientation is not new for marketing management. For last few decades various academic experts introduced numbers of papers related to the concept – in our days it is one the central ideas for the marketing discipline (Gary F. Gebhardt, Gregory S. Carpenter and John F. Sherry Jr. 2006, pp. 37-38). As well, few would undermine an opinion stating that market orientation is one of the central goals and priorities for the companies working with direct consumers today. Both large corporations and smaller enterprises focus their attention on building strong relationships with their customers and aim to understand their needs. While the companies which are established market leaders in most cases benefit in consumer knowledge, those who lack understanding of market needs often fail to keep their leadership position (V. Kumar, E. Jones, R. Venkatesan, & Robert P. Leone 2011, p. 16).
The key basics of market orientation come from customer focus – an approach which stands for thorough understanding of consumers and conducting activities centered at customers in the first place. While businesses realize the potential that fast response to consumer needs holds, companies are constantly engaged in the process of researching the customers, identifying their needs and peculiarities of their behavior. Understanding the peculiarities of customer behavior on the market allows businesses to pursue strategic and operational steps that are more compelling for customers and thus more efficient for the business. What is more important, businesses understand the need to not only keep up with existing market trends but to make forecasts and catch the tendencies which are yet only to come into force – needs that exist among consumers’ minds but are not presented in the form of a verbalized demand for now (Kohli and Jaworski 1990).
Many various factors affect the alterations within consumer behavior – the process is moving in a lot of directions causing both minor and major changes to the way companies are working with their consumers. Generational theory is an example of an academic theory which helps to conceptualize the directions in which consumers not only vary from each other but also change within time. Originally presented by William Strauss and Neil Howe this theory is to help us to understand the way major societal and historical events, as well as common development and progress levels affect the way people behave within the society. It was only logical for marketers and academic researchers to investigate the way generational theory might be implemented in order to explain the ways in which consumers change their behavior. It turned out that a large portion of various variables within consumer behavior might be explained by attributing consumers to a certain generational cohort and it might also be applied for forecasting
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the alterations that for now are only to come into force. While the concept could not be employed as a single factor determining the complex nature of consumer behavior, attempts to make certain wider conclusions basing on it have been made by many academic researchers and representatives of a business society.
Recently, the theory became a popular subject for discussion of in terms of recent generations of consumer who are believed to disrupt the market. According to Goldman Sachs Generation of Millennials is considered to be the largest generation in history of consumption and currently is the most spending one as of today. General public, as well as academic and business society have all been the parts of the discussion which is aimed at understanding the ways these people are changing the market, businesses and existing models. Because of the fact that for now Millenials seem to be dominating the market, the discussion is not heavily concerned with Generation Z – the one that comes right after Millenials. However, specialist say that Generation Z is the next one to take the reins and, in fact, it might turn out to be even more unpredictable and disrupting (EY 2015). For now, we do not possess a large portion of information on how consumers of Generation Z differ from others and what is needed to be taken into consideration when targeting them. At the same time, according to the researchers, the representatives of this generation already present more than $44 billion in purchasing power (“Activities of Kids and Teens,” Mintel Reports, November 2013).
Another particularly interesting factor that is one of the most interesting ones for the marketers and businesses and is expected to correlate with generational differences, is consumer skepticism. According to Deloitte, Millennials, as well as Generation Z are the most skeptical generations: they have low trust in businesses, economics, leaders and various platforms, for instance, social media (Deloitte Global Millennial Survey 2019). While specialists who aim to understand the peculiarities of consumer behavior and the ones who are to gain practical value from such understanding are becoming increasingly concerned with the phenomena of consumer skepticism it is important to highlight the fact that many traditional techniques of consumer persuasion need to be revised in the situation when more and more consumers are skeptical. Nonetheless, it raises a wider and a more complex matter of a matrix of interaction between consumers and businesses. The question is also of high importance for the businesses for the reason that functioning in a society cannot go on without responding to the needs of people who represent major parts of the society. In other words, raising skepticism might be a signal of major trust issues within the relationships of business and society. The relevance of further research is explored in detail throughout the following steps of this work. Nonetheless, to conclude this part we have to highlight the importance of studying the nature of consumer skepticism within Generation Z. We, as the researchers, are interested in exploring the phenomena, assessing its
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importance and developing the recommendations both for future research in the area and for the specialists who are working with related subjects in practical environment.
Research gaps in existing consumer behavior studies
Generational theory was developed and popularized by Strauss and Howe in the 1990s. Nonetheless, through all the twentieth century academics all over the western world were contributing to studying generations and many preceding works are present. The first public attempt to tackle the question was performed by Karl Mannheim in his essay “The Problem of Generations” in 1923. By the end of the century generational theory became extremely widespread and highly popular within, at first, sociology and demographics and then within marketing, consumer behavior advertising studies.
As for today, existing literature provides us with substantial amount of information on the interconnection between consumer behavior and generational cohorts. At the same time, while extensive research has been conducted on Millennials by both businesses (BCG 2012; McKinsey 2016; Bain & Company 2017; Deloitte 2017, KPMG 2017; Deloitte 2018; Deloitte 2019) and academic researchers (Eddy S. W. Ng, Linda Schweitzer, Sean T. Lyons 2010; Madrigal Moreno, Flor & Gil Lafuente, Jaime & Avila, Fernando & Madrigal Moreno, Salvador 2017; Ordun, Guven 2015), Generation Z only started to come into the spotlight of researchers during last few years. This fact should not leave any questions because these years this generation is only starting to play a major role in consumption structure previously heavily occupied by Millennials and other generations. In recent years Deloitte has started to describe Generations Z within its Global Millenial Survey, aiming to gather a substantial scale of opinions of thousands of people who are considered to be a part of Generation Z. The international research also covers various aspects of economic views and behavioral patterns, including consumption. However, an extremely limited amount of information on Generation Z and their behavior in Russia is presented over the available researches. Several international organizations, including Forbes and Sparks & Honey refer to this generation in Russia. Notable researches on the subject of consumer behavior differences between various generational cohorts in Russia were conducted by Amato and Shevchenko in 2013, as well as by Maletin in 2017. More general researches on the topic of generational cohorts were conducted by Soldatova and Rasskazova in 2014; Shamis and Nikonov in 2016. However, none of these researches concentrate their attention entirely on Generation Z. As a matter of fact, many studies were conducted during the period of time when generational theory just entered Russian academia and was highly popularized – long time before Generation Z could participate in any sort of studies regarding their consumer behavior. It is important to highlight the fact that, despite the certainty that generational cohorts are generally assumed to be global, each society has its own
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cultural and historical background which does not allow us see the representatives of one generational cohort in different countries as people with same generational influence – while many common characteristics might be more or less universal, if we decide to dive into the peculiarities of consumer behavior we should perceive every single society as a unique one, especially if we are to discuss the societies which are different in their very core – for instance, Western Europe and Russia. All in all, it might be concluded that Generation Z is poorly investigated in the realities of our country. Moreover, their consumer behavior is a question that has barely been explored yet. The current study aims to fill this gap and provide both businesses and academia with data on the subject we are discussing.
Our work is, in fact, concerned with a certain characteristic of Generation Z rather than with generational theory as a whole. While the theoretical aspects definitely need clarifications, we are particularly discussing market skepticism as a phenomenon. In general, skepticism refers to a person’s tendency to doubt, disbelieve, and question (e.g., Boush, Friestad, & Rose, 1994; Forehand& Grier, 2003). Consumers’ attitudes towards business, marketing and advertising have been researched throughout the second half of twentieth century soon after marketing established itself as an institution (Barksdale & Darden, 1972; Gaski & Etzel, 1986; Muehling, 1987; Andrews, 1989). As it will be explored in detail further in this work, consumer skepticism is a derivative from persuasion knowledge of consumers: both concepts describe affective and cognitive structures within the consumers and describe the process in which a consumer is considering themselves to get familiar and substantially alerted on how marketers or businesses in whole might affect their thoughts and actions, as well as react to that – for instance, by becoming skeptical about the market or its particular components as in case of advertising skepticism. Existing research on the role of persuasion knowledge in consumer response to marketing stimuli embraces a wide range of marketing tools used in the field of advertising (Jewell, B., 2007), pricing (Hardesty et al., 2007), public relations (Foreh, G., 2003), interpersonal selling (Williams et al., 2004), brand management (Van H., Pieters, 2012), retail marketing (Lunardo, M., 2013) and others. Given the fact that today market skepticism is believed to be on the rise the subject regularly comes into the spotlight of consumers (Kasriel-Alexander, 2016). However, the issue is in most cases discussed through the perspective of persuasion knowledge. While in terms of structure it is, in fact, a particular aspect of abovementioned, there is a substantial need to explore the nature of the phenomena separately as the construct is large and complex. In Russia studies on persuasion knowledge which incorporate an issue of consumer skepticism were also performed (Golovacheva, 2016; Golovacheva, Smirnova, 2017). All in all, despite being popular with researchers, the subject is still underexplored and lacks domestic investigation in Russia. A clear research gap exists within market skepticism in Russia and our researched is focused on filling it.
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As for market skepticism of Generation Z it can bу stated that the topic is barely explored yet – we did not manage to find major relevant investigation on both factors affecting consumer behavior (generational cohort distribution and market skepticism) altogether in Russia. While popular web resources provide us with articles stating the question and raising its importance, no empirical studies seems to be conducted in our country. To conclude, we might say that an interconnection between generational cohort and market skepticism is heavily undiscovered presenting only general statements in Russian realities. For that reason, we consider an attempt to fill this gap a relevant decision.