Consumer Culture Insights Group

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Consumer Culture Insights Group

Birds eye view of a crowd.

We conduct insightful and impactful consumer research to create solutions and develop frameworks that guide theory, policy and marketing campaigns. How can we help you?

The Consumer Culture Insights Group (CCIG) is a group of marketing scholars who study consumer behaviour and emerging markets using research methods with data based on interviews, observations, and focus groups. We examine how lived experiences offer important insights, focusing on consumers' values, beliefs, behaviours, and identities and the ways consumers buy. We also investigate how changes in everyday consumer culture offer insights for the future. Innovative organisations, including firms, governments and non-profits, incorporate these insights into marketing-related decisions in a wide range of ways, including product development, traditional advertising, social media, and branding.

Our expertise

We combine interpretive, critical, socio-historical and cultural approaches to understand consumer actions on multiple levels.

Macro

Focusing on inequalities in consumer culture that stem from age, gender, ethnicity, social class, religion and subcultures.

Micro/agentic focus

With a focus on issues relating to consumer identity, practices and values, we seek to improve consumer lifestyle, health and wellbeing.

Systemic focus

By focusing on cultural phenomena that spreads at a consumer level, locally and globally, we seek to improve lives by understanding issues related to the sharing economy, consumer innovation, value co-creation and collaborative networks.
Global.

Managerial focus

Examining various business levels, we aim to enable businesses to make better decisions by understanding reasoning, practicality, influences and connections within existing business networks.

Key research areas

Consumer Insights: Markets

Research in this area includes consumer effects on market development, consumption communities, consumer experiences and market exclusion and dispossession.

Consumer Insights: Gender

Research in this area includes gender status bias, body image, patriarchal advertising and overt and covert violence related to gender.

Consumer Insights: Sustainability

Research in this area includes sustainability in subsistence economies, distortions effects of tourism, and impacts from consumer use of toxins.

Consumer Insights: Wellbeing

Research in this area includes consumer difficulties, interventions for health, experiences of vulnerable consumers and inclusion efforts.

Consumer Insights: Branding

Research in this area includes interactions of brands and causes, brand aesthetics and effects of celebrity on brands.

Our projects

Positioning a Major Australian Surf Brand in the USA
This project focuses on understanding values, identity and related issues at the subcultural level including how Australian and American surfers understood the value and authenticity of brands. Similar work was also carried out as a part of a major Australian Research Council Grant on how culture can inform branding.
Shaping Connections
Shaping Connections seeks to understand better how information and computer technology use supports seniors’ connectedness and enhances social inclusion and participation. Our focus is on increased social inclusion for older Australians to enhance wellbeing and have a positive effect on physical and mental health.
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Gender Equality in Advertising
ShEqual promotes gender equality and addresses the drivers of violence against women in the advertising setting. This project engages key stakeholders encompassing industry, regulators, violence prevention and gender equality sectors to build evidence, support and action to end sexism in advertising.
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Protecting the Baltic Sea
Some 3.5 million leisure boats in the Baltic Sea use the coastal areas for recreational boating. Our results contribute to new risk assessment of antifouling products by measurement of the eco-toxicity of the paints

Insights

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Members

We are a dynamic team of marketing scholars with over 50 years of cumulative experience, producing culturally-informed insights into consumer behaviour and culture.

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Engagement

Doctoral Studies

Information for prospective doctoral students

Thank you for your interest in doctoral studies in Marketing at RMIT University. Our department is a dynamic, collegial and rewarding place to research a variety of topics in including areas of consumer culture theory including sustainability, gender, markets, branding and wellbeing. We seek only the most intellectually talented, self-motivated, creative and inquisitive students to join the next generation of scholars in the global marketing academy.

If you think RMIT might be the place for you, we encourage you to get familiar with faculty who research Consumer Culture Theory. You can find our work in publications such as Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Retailing, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Strategic Marketing, and Consumption, Markets and Culture, and the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing.

If you see your future with RMIT Marketing, please submit your application and make your case. You can find important deadlines and other information for applications for the doctoral program below.

Contact

Visit us

Address: Building 80, 445 Swanston Street, Melbourne,  VIC-3000
Location: Melbourne City campus , Building 80
Hours: Monday - Friday 9:00 - 17:00

Postal address

School of Economics, Finance and Marketing
GPO Box 2476
Melbourne 3001, Victoria, Australia

Get in touch

Professor Diane M. Martin: diane.martin@rmit.edu.au
Dr. Amanda Spry: amanda.spry@rmit.edu.au
Dr. Torgeir Aleti: torgeir.aleti@rmit.edu.au
Professor Francis Farrelly: francis.farrelly@rmit.edu.au
Associate Professor Bernardo Figueiredo: bernardo.figueiredo@rmit.edu.au
Dr. Lauren Gurrieri: lauren.gurrieri@rmit.edu.au
Dr. Samuelson Appau: samuelson.appau@rmit.edu.au
Dr. Marian Makkar: marian.makkar@rmit.edu.au

LinkedIn

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Partnerships

Network Victoria University of the Third Age logo
ACCAN Austrlian Communications Consumer Action Network
Shequal advertising equality logo
aboriginal flag
torres strait flag

Acknowledgement of country

RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nation on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business. - Artwork created by Louisa Bloomer

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