SIDNEY J.

LEVY

Consumer behavior depth interviews are grouped with other

kinds of story telling-fairy tales, novels, psychological test
responses, and myths-as imaginative statements that can
be qualitatively interpreted for their functional and symbolic
content. Drawing upon the Claude Levi-Strauss approach to
the analysis of myths, a structuralist interpretation illustrates
application to the age, sex, and social status dimensions
of food consumption.

INTEPRETING CONSUMER
MYTHOLOGY: A STRUCTURAL
APPROACH TO CONSUMER
BEHAVIOR

Q UALITATIVE research in current marketing
study usually involves focus group interviews,
sometimes depth interviews, and projective tech-
niques (Bellenger et al. 1976). There is a resurgence
of interest in the analysis of expressive verbal
materials elicited by such data-gathering methods,
but little contemporary marketing literature exists
about such analysis. The goal of this paper is to
explore and illustrate the idea that verbal materials
elicited from people in the marketplace are a form
of storytelling that can be analyzed as projective.
The responses of a consumer telling about the
purchase and use of products may be approached
from varied viewpoints. Here, the remarks (the
protocol) are taken as a literary production we might
interpret in ways comparable to those of clinical
psychologists, social anthropologists, and literary
critics. A recent view of anthropological concepts
Sidney J. Levy is Professor of Behavioral Science in
Management and Chairman, Department of Marketing,
at Northwestern University.
Journal of Marketing
Vol. 45 (Summer 1981), 49-61.
(Levy 1978) especially stimulated the attempt to
use the Levi-Strauss structuralist approach by lik-
ening consumers' household anecdotes to the myths
that he has mined so richly.
In open-ended interviewing about the consump-
tion of products, respondents are often asked to
describe the product features the family members
prefer, to characterize family consumption patterns,
to tell about recent instances of using the product,
and to explain how and why given products are
used. The results of such interviews are commonly
reported in a somewhat literal manner, in tabulations
of use frequencies, in lists of features cited, in
verbal summaries that most people said this or that,
or even in lists of verbatim comments without
additional comments by the researchers. Ordinarily,
the goals are to learn facts of usage and reasons
given for and against the product.
Such handling of the data often seems barren
and frustrating because it is not sufficiently pene-
trating, does not tell enough about the meaning of
the product in relation to the lives of the users,
and its place among other products. The approach
suggested here is to avoid accepting the responses
A Structural Approach to Consumer Behavior / 49
as if they are scientific observations to be tabulated
as measures. Rather, the assumption is that the
products are used symbolically, and that the telling
about their uses is a way of symbolizing the life
and nature of the family; thus it requires a theory
of interpretation that determines how the data are
to be related and understood. Sanche de Gramont
(1970, p. 7) illustrates the point:
I like to imagine these Three Wise Men of the
Occident bent in contemplation over a South
American Indian myth about a boy who steals a
pet pig from his father and roasts it in the forest.
Freud would conclude that the boy is symbolically
killing his father becausae he desires his mother.
Marx would say that this youthful member of the
proletariat is seizing control of the methods of
production in the class struggle against the landed
gentry. Levi-Strauss would find that, in cooking
the pig, the primitive Indian boy had achieved the
passage from nature to culture and shown that his
thought processes are no different from Einstein's.
A conventional marketing approach would probably
accept the boy's explanation at face value and
conclude that he was hungry, that the pig was
convenient, cheap, and tasted good.
The question is raised: If consumer responses
are stories (or parts thereof) that tell about the
family, how shall the stories be interpreted? Some
guidance may come from observing how various
kinds of stories are studied, as their analysts search
for meanings in such as fairy tales, plays, novels,
psychological test responses, and myths, en route
to studying consumer research protocols.
In reading fairy tales, as a first example, the
reader (consumer) reacts directly with ideas and
feelings. Bruno Bettelheim explains in detail the
sources of the consumer satisfaction, showing how
fairy tales enrich psychological development and
assist in solving fundamental human problems. He
points out the message the fairy tales get across
to the child in manifold form: ". . . that a struggle
against severe difficulties in life is unavoidable, is
an intrinsic part of human existence-that if one
does not shy away, but steadfastly meets unexpect-
ed and often unjust hardships, one masters all
obstacles and at the end emerges victorious" (Bet-
telheim 1977, p. 8).
As people mature, the literature of plays and
novels remains endlessly absorbing, as is the story-
telling on radio, in the movies, and on television.
The audience is insatiably curious to know what
the characters did, what happened next, and how
did it come out? Underlying is the belief that the
fictions are significantly related to real events, that
experiencing the simulated version in this vicarious
way is intellectually and emotionally beneficial
and/ or destructive.
50 / Journal of Marketing, Summer 1981
By extension, the lives of authors are of interest
to their readers. Even people who have not read
the writer's work can enjoy reading about the writer
as a person (to have more knowledge, to feel like
an insider, to reduce the stature of great figures,
to be reassured or titillated by their humanity, their
ordinariness, or their bizarre genius). Other analysts
want to find clues to illuminate the writings, to
understand better the meaning of Finnegan's Wake
or Alice in Wonderland. And others want to explore
the nature and processes of creativity as they go
on in creators or as they are manifest in their
productions.
Thus, the search for meanings expressed in a
story goes on at various levels: (1) The experiencing
and direct interpretation by the reader is fundamen-
tal. (2) That experience is abstracted, generalized,
and explained by a scholar for the insight it provides
into human nature. (3) The work (product) is inter-
preted for the means by which it achieves its effects.
(4) The teller of the story is studied as a unique
source of inspiration or an example of a type. Where
the authorship is anonymous, as in folk tales, myths,
and many fairy tales, or has its roots recognized
in ancient chronicles, the source may be interpreted
as part of some national or ethnic character. (5)
The author is studied to develop and illuminate the
meaning of the work. (6) Relationships between
the author and the work are studied and interpreted
as examples of general processes of expression,
whether the focus is on how the author's personality
is visible in the writing or on the means by which
self-expression was concealed or transformed. In
the same ways, a protocol in which a consumer
tells the story of how the product is consumed can
be examined for how the consumer interprets the
consumption experience, what it tells about people
in general, to see how the product features are
related to consumption, to learn what the protocol
says about the segment it represents, to observe
how the individual consumer's character, personal-
ity, and life-style help explain the nature of the
product, and what the instance explains about the
general nature of that kind of consuming.
Having suggested the problem in a general way,
this paper will examine the nature of interpretation
of self-expression, lay groundwork for application
to the study of consumer behavior, and give an
example of such application.
Modes of Analysis
There is intuitive recognition that authors of stories
must express their personalities in the story. Projec-
tive techniques as research and clinical tools explore
the ways people transform and externalize their
experience in some narrative form, as a general
phenomenon and specifically in response to given
materials, in accordance with David Rapaport's
formulation of the projective hypothesis, as follows.
All behavioral manifestations of the human
being, including the least and the most significant,
are revealing and expressive of his personality, by
which we mean that individual principle of which
he is the carrier. This formulation of the projective
hypothesis implies a specific definition of the term
"behavior," which includes all of the following
aspects: (a) behavior historically viewed in the
life-history; (b) behavior statically viewed as re-
flected in the environment with which the subject
surrounds himself, as the furniture of his house,
the clothes he wears, etc.; expressive movements;
(d) internal behavior, including percepts, fantasies,
thoughts. (Rapaport 1942, p. 213)
Characteristically, interpretation of proj ective
techniques follows two paths. (1) Specific compo-
nents of the story (test protocol) are tabulated and
used systematically to evaluate either an individual's
responses or the empirical validity of generalizations
about groups. An example of this approach is the
case of the Rorschach: Certain perceptions of the
inkblots are so common they are designated as
popular responses. One element of an individual's
adjustment is then derived from the number of
popular responses he / she gives, as norms suggest
it is too many or too few. However, counting popular
responses or the length of stories to establish norms
for population groups in a purely empirical manner
is relatively superficial, compared, say, to having
a theory about conformity, rigidity, deviance, and
the meanings of the specific perceptions. (2) Quali-
tative analysis accepts introspection as data and
looks for subjective meanings, thus facing the
necessity for interpretation. It is phenomenological
and interested in symbolic interactionism, trying
to see what lies behind or is meant by the manifest
behavior. This viewpoint considers social events
to be unlike events in the natural sciences. The
social events are selected and attended to because
of their significance to the people involved, and
thus are psychological events in social contexts.
By the logic of the projective hypothesis and
the definition of human events as symbolic, inter-
pretation becomes a process of searching for mean-
ing, that is, finding out how mental phenomena-
such inner representations of experiences as ideas,
imagery, and consumption fantasies as forms of
storytelling to the self-are related to interactions
with other people and the physical world.
Leslie Stephen wrote that people's doctrines do
not become operative in behavior until they have
generated an imaginative symbolism. We make
A Structural Approach to Consumer Behavior / 51
distinctions among these imaginative symbolisms
by classifying types of narratives. One kind of tale
commonly told within a social group is the myth.
Formal interpretation of myths is concerned with
classifying and explaining grand myths-those tales
of the gods, beasts, and heroes that are about the
creation of the world, human birth and death, taking
form as accounts of floods, supernatural creatures,
matings of gods and mortals, heroic family ro-
mances, saviors and seers, and cataclysmic physical
events. The aim is to demonstrate the similarities
and differences among cultures of their grand myths,
the sources of the myths, and to explicate the
realities to which the mythological symbols referred
(Frazer 1927).
In recent years, the study of myths was much
invigorated by the work of Claude Levi-Strauss.
He notes reasons why distinctions are made between
tales and myths, but does not regard them as
fundamental. He calls tales miniature myths and
sees them all as susceptible to the same type of
analysis. This analysis involves certain main fea-
tures at the heart of Levi-Strauss's contribution.
• The purpose of myth is to provide a logical
model capable of overcoming contradictions
or paradoxes in natural and social experience.
• Interpretation of myths seeks their essential
structural characteristics (in contrast to a
functional analysis that links the myth to the
social situation that is its local context).
• The structural analysis reveals universal
human cognitive processes. These mental
operations consist of creating patterns rooted
in the perceptions of opposites, manipulating
binary relations, and developing mediating
terms and triads in various sequences and
aggregations.
• A holistic attitude is required, the analysis
being addressed to the clustering and in-
terdependency of elements.
The fundamental character of a myth points to
its universal mode of thought, the way it transcends
local culture. As Levi-Strauss says, "its substance
does not lie in its style, its original music, or its
. syntax, but in the story which it tells" (Levi-Strauss,
1963, p. 210). When one takes the many versions
of the myth (for example, the stories of Oedipus,
including the Homeric, Sophoclean, and Freudian),
a structural analysis takes account of all the variants,
to arrive at the structural law of the myth. That
is, what is it really about? The analysis reaches
the conclusion that the myth struggles with the
contradiction between the idea that human beings
originate autochthonously and the idea that they
are born of the union of man and woman-out
of one or out of two.
Stories are analyzed by breaking them down
into gross constituent units Levi-Strauss calls myth-
emes. The mythemes result from a play of binary
or ternary oppositions. For example, in a tale a
king is not only a king and a shepherdess a shep-
herdess, but these words and what they signify
become tangible means of constructing an intelligi-
ble system formed by the oppositions: male / female
(with regard to nature) and high/low (with regard
to culture), as well as the possible permutations
among the six terms. In this way, Levi-Strauss
discerns a universal metalanguage, recognizing, as
Miriam Rodin says, the way in which underlying
relational principles order cognition across several
domains.
Edmund Leach (1974, p. 76) offers broad struc-
tural schema in Figure 1 summarizing the relative
positions of men, animals, and deities in Greek
mythology in a matrix formed by the oppositions
above / below, this world / other world, and cul-
ture / nature. The analysis will be extended in this
paper by amplifying the left side of this structure,
elaborating Men in Cities as men, women, and
children in high and low social statuses.
If we take the idea that myths are ways of
organizing perceptions of realities, of indirectly
expressing paradoxical human concerns, they have
consumer relevance because these realities and
concerns affect people's daily lives. The issues of
male/female, nature/culture, and high/low, for
example, are not reserved to story-telling occasions
about kings and shepherdesses but are also being
acted out in everyday behavior. Some marketing
FIGURE 1
Structural Relations in Greek Mythology
Eagles
52 / Journal of Marketing, Summer 1981
study approaches the same generalized, universal
level as the grand myths. In his dissertation on
The Social Construction of Consumption Patterns,
Firat wrestles with the paradox of poor and disad-
vantaged consumers establishing irrational con-
sumption patterns in cars and expensive foods. He
seeks to show how society induces patterns that
express such fundamental structural antinomies in
consumption as individual/collective, private / pub-
lic, and passive / active. At this level of analysis,
individual choice behavior is almost irrelevant, being
interpreted as a manifestation of conformity to the
culture's dominant consumption pattern (Firat
1978). In another universal vein, the work of Daniel
B. Williams (1976) examines individual consumer
purchasing behavior, interpreting the decision mak-
ing process to a highly generalized level. In analyzing
the problem spaces or mediums for problem solving
used by the individual purchase problem solver,
Williams identifies such space attributes as within
the organism / outside the organism, fast / slow,
high / low, and phenomenal/ transphenomenal.
The idea of taking the consumer protocol as
a kind of story to be interpreted draws from various
traditions. Robert P. Abelson, for instance, dis-
cusses the concept of cognitive script, defining
script as "a coherent sequence of events expected
by the individual, involving him either as a par-
ticipant or as an observer" (Abelson 1976, p. 33).
Scripts are formed by the linking of chains of
vignettes, the latter being "the raw constituents
of remembered episodes in the individual's
experience. " He insists on this holism and criticizes
the "elementaristic, stilted, and static" positions
common among cognitive and social psychologists,
and stresses the way vignettes are "coherently
GODS
Poseidon
(sea)
linked. " Vignettes in the consumer's script corre-
spond to the mythemes Levi-Strauss observes in
myths, where he similarly insists on the necessity
for analysis of clusters or bundles of mythemes.
As with scripts, myths may be dealt with particu-
laristically as factual descriptions of recalled events,
as traditional marketing research questionnaires
typically do; or as revealing basic universal human
structures, as Levi-Strauss seeks to do. In between,
we may seek to interpret sufficiently to get below
the surface, and concretely enough to apply the
ideas to consumer events.
The Present Study
To gather scripts, vignettes, or mythemes as an
illustrative instance for this paper, a sample of six
consumers was interviewed at length about the
various family members, their individual charac-
teristics, and especially their attitudes and behavior
in relation to food. The respondents are married,
middle-class housewives with young children living
at home. Each was asked to talk about her husband
and children and how they like and dislike their
foods prepared. The women were particularly asked
to relate family stories, those little tales or bits
offamily lore that are repeated to family and friends
as ways of typifying the family members. These
interviews were interpreted using a background of
hundreds of depth interviews from marketing stud-
ies of many food products. It should be understood
that numbers are not relevant here. The purpose
is to illustrate the use of a qualitative, structuralistic
approach, not to sample for representativeness, to
measure distributions, nor to compute the signifi-
cance of differences.
The tales that were gathered are taken as su-
sceptible to interpretation at the various levels and
in the various modes noted earlier: as descriptions
of consumer experineces, as projections of the
housewife storyteller, as revealing the family-
members, as symbolizing the abstracted functions
serving the participants and the social unit, and
as mundane, secular, little myths that organize
consumer reality in accordance with underlying
logical structures. Levi-Strauss points to three levels
at which versions of myths may be situated: myths
of origin and emergence, myths of migrations, and
village tales in which "the great logical or cosmo-
logical contrasts have been toned down to the scale
of social relations" (Levi-Strauss 1969, p. 333).
The little myths of the family are a fourth level
of toning down. Little myths are generalizations
about the family and its members, told in the form
of anecdotes that use selected facts drawn from
the fund of past experiences.
A Structural Approach to Consumer Behavior / 53
The analysis proceeded by close reading of
verbatim transcriptions of the interviews. Observing
how respondents project their perceptions of them-
selves and their families, their language, assump-
tions, emotional tone, logic, and choice of incidents,
the following issues were interpreted.
• Purposes served by the telling of little myths.
• Values preferences portrayed.
• Theories used in accounting for the behavior
of family members.
• Structural relationships of characteristics and
categories that are used.
Purposes
The stories serve an interwoven set of purposes.
Like grand myths, they refer to origins of the group
and explain how ancestors came together and what
life was like in those days. Typically, there is a
Paradise Lost aura to the stories-' 'What fun we
used to have going to the lake."
I remember we used to all get together, and
my uncle had a truck with just wooden sides on
it and we would go up and picnic, the whole family,
aunts, uncles, cousins, and everyone would ride
on the back of the truck. There was always some-
body there for you. We would go up to lakes and
swim; we would have a picnic out at the lake.
It was just nice because everybody went; it was
something that everybody joined in on.
The stories act as retrospective affirmations of ties
and conflicts when relatives reminisce, and to induct
new group members by marriage, birth, and friend-
ship into family traditions by transmitting a fund
of important values, ideas, and characteristics. They
instruct in the life-style of the lineage, the kind
of housing, clothing, transportation, recreation, and
food it was and is customary to consume.
The stories illustrate specific relationships and
personalities. Often, there is a self-justifying quali-
ty: The story proves that the people really are (or
were) like that.
I had a car when I was sixteen; I got it as
a graduation present, and my sisters and I and
my cousins-my one cousin, we're all very close-
we were out. I don't know, I think we went to
McDonalds, or whatever, and we were supposed
to be home by nine o'clock, and we didn't get
in until nine-thirty, and, sure enough, we came
to the door and my mom says, "Where have you
been?" and I just said, "Oh, ask Jean," who was
my cousin, who was behind me. And my mom
says something about "this time you're really going
to get it," and out shot a hand, and I ducked and
Jean ducked, and my baby sister got it. And that-it
wasn't that it was that hard, but it was harder
than a love tap. Sure enough, Jean and I were
always the ones that were ducking, and my sister
was always the one who was getting it. That's
typical.
Abstracted from the flow of childhood events, this
little myth becomes paradigmatic and polished.
Some of the details are offered as less important.
Maybe it was not McDonald's, although saying that
it was indicates the innocence of the occasion. The
"sure enoughs," the "always," and "that's typical"
highlight the mythic character of the story, the way
it verifies and generalizes the teller's virtue and
cleverness, the sibling rivalry, the mother's role,
etc.
Values and Preferences
In selecting stories to tell, the respondents project
their concern with certain values. Middle-class
women highlight middle-class values deemed
important for transmission through the generations.
As telling stories is a method of maintaining family
traditions, it is not surprising that the importance
of family unity is repeatedly asserted as such a
value. One's childhood was part of a close family
or regretfully was not; the mother now strives to
have a close family, or regrets that maturation and
modern life-styles are destroying that closeness.
Closeness is evidenced in doing things together,
sharing enjoyable experiences such as family pic-
nics, sports outings, travel, hobbies, meals, house-
hold projects, in living nearby, in helping one
another, showing concern about the children's
companions, and occasionally in some special inti-
macy of emotional communication or understand-
ing.
The dimension of conformity to or deviation
from manly norms comes up in relation to food.
The traditional husband is a "meat and potatoes
man."
His favorite meal is pot roast with potatoes
and carrots and onions in a big pot.
He likes roast and gravy. That would be his
most special meal. Roast and potatoes, and a
vegetable, and lots of bread and butter.
He's kind of a meat and potatoes man.
This pattern reflects the central American diet;
therefore, it seems proper and hardly requires
explanation. It often goes on in the context of "he
eats everything" except perhaps the conventional
hatreds (liver) or less usual foods, such as arti-
chokes.
As a cultural subgroup each family also has its
local values. It is easy to gather an array of sum-
maries of family tastes. Women generalize that They
all love chicken, They're not crazy about fish, We
don't eat any raw vegetables, They all like it rare,
They like casseroles. Such remarks are usually not
literally true (as fuller discussion reveals): but are
imaginative generalizations (not imaginary) that
54 / Journal of Marketing, Summer 1981
symbolize the kind of family being described as
stubborn eaters, narrow eaters, easy to feed, and
so on, and show what kind of woman the homemaker
is to cope with such a family.
Consumers' Theories
The above kinds of behavior may seem conventional
but are often left unexplained because they are so
taken for granted or seem so easily accounted for
as a common learning. But husbands who are not
meat and potatoes men require explanation; when
a family member departs from the norm of eating
what the mother regards as an ordinary diet, a
problem is posed. The ideas put forth by the women
to explain food handling and preferences or aver-
sions take many forms, as shown by examples in
Table 1. Some stories are mystery stories; the
behavior seems baffling, arbitrary, inexplicable.
The two kids split an egg, the older one takes
the yellow, and the younger one takes the white.
I haven't the faintest idea why they feel that way,
I really don't.
For instance, he won't eat the potatoes and
gravy if it runs into the meat. I don't know why.
He has this huge plate, and he separates it all on
the edges, nothing in the middle.
A framework that operates in the thinking of
the respondents has such elements as these:
• The process of acquiring and inculcating
tastes in the service of health beliefs and
propriety is a conflict-filled one. Cooks are
motivated to get the family to eat what is
served by various moral imperatives, such
as that's what people like us eat, the food
comprises a healthy diet, and providing it
and eating it are ways of showing love (and
other emotions). Although there is more plea-
sure and satisfaction involved than in the
cleaning part of housekeeping, families do
not harmoniously eat everything, but refuse,
resist, or disparage, as well as praise.
• There is a natural hierarchy of desirable to
offensive attributes of foods. Any extreme
may be troublesome, such as in foods that
are too fatty, greasy, spicy, rich, etc. The
extremes (e.g. salty, slimy) may be enjoyed
(caviar, anchovies, oysters), but go on at the
periphery of what is ordinarily healthy or
suited to usual tastes. Some foods are thought
likely to affect anyone with their typical
actions of producing burping or wind (rad-
ishes, cucumber, beans, onions), looseness
(spinach, prunes), or hardness (rice). Sweet
foods seem naturally easy to like.
 TABLE 1
Consumer Explanations
Behavior
Chicken liver, calves liver, I don't even prepare.
I used to make tongue quite a bit.
I learned to modify the wine and butter; I cook very
simply now.
Polish sauerkraut. He hates it.
All of a sudden I find myself taking a piece of cake
or something, if it's yummy looking.
I'm the only one that likes eggplant.
They like everything.
My daughter would not eat meat at all.
• Individuals vary in being physiologically vul-
nerable, perhaps prone to weight gain or
peculiarly sensitive to certain substances.
Illness, skin eruptions, respiratory distress,
etc., may be explained as simply idiosyncratic
reactions or as allergies rooted in either
psychological or social factors, or injust that
kind of body.
• Taste preferences are explained at all
levels-as due to some sheer physiology of
the taste buds, as inherited in the genes, as
socialized by ethnic context and by family
practices, and as due to novel patterns of
individual experiences, beliefs, and habitua-
tions.
Structural Relations
Food preparation, service, manners, and consump-
tion are all used in symbolic ways. As Levi-Strauss
notes in The Origin of Table Manners, "Thus we
can hope to discover how, in any particular society,
cooking is a language through which that society
unconsciously reveals its structure" (Levi-Strauss
1978,p. 495). The participants communicate through
their food behaviors, using the underlying structure
both consciously and unconsciously.
The American situation is difficult to interpret
in a clearcut way because the available vocabulary
Explanation
I think the whole world hates liver.
My older son said, "How can you eat tongue with your
tongue?" So that was the last time we had tongue.
My husband got terrible chest pains.
He says the whole house stinks for weeks after you
make it . . . he takes after my father. They both have a
queasy stomach and they hate smells.
I don't even like it, but I've got this idea that it's going
to help me bowling. It sounds silly, but that's the truth.
You kind of have to develop a test for it. I like all those
weird vegetables.
Probably because I don't give them a choice. Even
when they were little kids, I started getting them into
all sorts of different vegetables because I like
vegetables.
A neighbor is a vegetarian, and the woman would tell
her they kill that poor little animal, how can you eat
their meat?
is so large. The food products and artifacts come
from the whole globe and reflect a mixing of
traditions from many societies. The possibilities for
different patterns become useful in expressing cul-
tural pride, intergenerational and assimilational
conflicts, and individual peculiarities. New little
myths about microwave ovens, kiwi fruit, alfalfa
sprouts, and pouch cooking need to be gathered
to learn the fundamental meanings they will have
in the American cuisine. However, the present
interviews, interpreted against a background of
numerous studies of food products and attitudes,
suggest how individual and familial variations draw
upon the general vocabulary.
Sex and age grading. The roles of sex and age
grading are pronounced in distinguishing between
the varied suitabilities of foods and methods of
preparation. We can distinguish between babies and
teenagers, boys and girls, and also observe some
of the dimensions at work that affect different food
suitabilities. Babies need milk and soft, mushy,
undifferentiated foods. Ideas of nurturance, com-
fort, and easily digested nutrition go in this direction,
so that similar foods are regarded as suited to the
elderly and the sick. The organisms are weak and
should not have strong stimulation in spiciness nor
in being too hot or cold. Boys are stereotypically
expected to prefer chunky peanut butter, girls the
smooth, and gradually, the preference for homo-
A Structural Approach to Consumer Behavior / 55
 FIGURE 2
Age and Sex Differentiations in Foods and Their Meanings
genous dishes yields to mixtures and combinations.
With some maturity the hamburger comes into its
own as a youth food, especially appealing to teen-
agers. A lamb chop or salad is perhaps just right
for a woman and a roast or steak for a man. Figure
2 illustrates some typical relationships of age, sex,
foods, and their attributes.
Social status. Along with age and sex dimen-
sions with their varying degrees of strength and
56 / Journal of Marketing, Summer 1981
weakness, social class distinctions are pervasive.
These are interwoven, thus, there is a tendency
to equate higher social position with strength, ma-
turity, and food professionalism, and lower status
preferences with softness, greasiness, and sweet-
ness. Going up the scale, conventionality of
preparation yields increasingly to elaboration of
methods, greater use of herbs and spices, and usage
of unusual foods and ingredients. These qualities
 FIGURE 3
The Social Status Structure of Food Symbolism

are not reserved to the upper classes, of course, tication and skill may be achieved through special
but form part of the aspirations of lower status study or left in the hands of professional chefs,
groups as well, and are emulated on special occa- and enjoyed while eating out. Figure 3 indicates
sions. The ability to cook with appropriate sophis- a status hierarchy and some of its attributes.

A Structural Approach to Consumer Behavior / 57

 FIGURE 4
Eating at Home and Eating Out
PLACES
ATTRIBUTES
SPECIAL
Eating out(side). The in-or-out locus is a struc-
tural element that speaks of conventionality and
festivity, family unity and separation (Figure 4).
The conventional core is the meal at home, maternal,
comfortable, familiar, dependent, and routine. To
eat away from home carries more exciting meanings.
Outdoor, backyard, park, beach, imply freedom
from conventions, return to nature, primitive meth-
ods of cooking and eating (with fingers), no manners,
and lively physical and social activity.
Going out to eat at another home implies some
formality, dress-up, a step up in the elaboration
of preparation or distinctiveness of the dishes.
The idea of going out to eat at a restaurant
interacts with the meanings of the various types
of establishments to fit the sex and age grading,
and family status dimensions. The choices range
from lower class, greasy spoons and forthright
EATS cafes, through miscellaneous youthful fast
food and family style restaurants, to elegant,
cosmopolitan dining rooms. Moving the family unit
from the home to the restaurant tends to express
a festive attitude and the relaxation of parental
responsibility; this attitude becomes even more
pronounced for children and adds elements of
separation and liberation when they go to fast food
restaurants on their own. Lower class cafes and
fancy restaurants are adult in meaning, places for
58 / Journal of Marketing, Summer 1981
adults at work away from home (truck stops, execu-
tive business lunches). At the heights, haute cuisine
with its subtle sauces and other exotic efforts
symbolizes an elite use of leisure, an extreme degree
of refinement of the palate, and attendant sybaritic
sensibilities. People eat dishes they never have at
home and go beyond ordinary meats to expensive
cuts and seafoods.
Beyond the cooked. Cooking is aimed at nu-
merous objectives-making substances more chew-
able, more digestible, safer, warm and comforting,
and more interesting to the taste. It is a process
of culture, as opposed to the natural, and its degrees
of status tend to be equated with distancing from
the primitive and animal eating of raw food. As
indicated above, these degrees of status are ex-
pressed in complexity, subtlety, particular foods,
methods of preparation, and settings. Basic qualities
range from an infantile, homogeneous, mushy,
boiled grossness to a highly differentiated awareness
of textures, ingredients, seasonings, and nuances
of preparation.
Little myths are dynamic and change as new
experiences become available. Recently added in
the raw-to-cooked dimension is a new myth of high
status consumption that might be termed tran-
scendental or self-conscious rawness. Like a kind
of conspicuous underconsumption or like the French
 FIGURE 5
The Food Mythology Complex

court dressing as Watteau shepherds and shepher- and exclaiming over their daring in eating raw
desses, one finds elegantly dressed partygoers eating hamburger (steak tartar) or raw fish (sushi). With
various raw vegetables with their fingers (crudites), a heightened physicality (exercising, jogging), the

A Structural Approach to Consumer Behavior / 59

sophisticated return to nature goes with natural
rather than processed cheeses, live bacterial pro-
cesses in yogurt, yeasts, and yerba, peasant grains
and dark breads. It is a retreat from over-refinement,
a cycling down to rescue the effete body and restore
its sexual vigor, mingled with the elite cosmopoli-
tanism of imported dishes.
In much of this consumer behavior there is no
contradiction; rather, the social group prescribes
roles and their accompanying symbols; and con-
sumers participate by adopting the roles and symbols
suited to their identities. However, animating the
process are the deeper contradictions and conflicts
that question whether the physical differences attri-
buted to age and sex differences are properly fitted
to the culinary and dietary differences. That is,
are we preparing and eating the right things? Women
should be good cooks by their maternal nature;
but the highest art and science of cookery paradoxi-
cally tend to be attributed to male chefs (pace,
Julia Child). Is hierarchy real? Are the foods, dishes,
methods, and deferential service sufficient in their
symbolism to reassure the elite that it is truly
elevated? Does eating and thinking make it so?
Perhaps even more fundamental to the little
myths, given the insistent refinements of gustatory
perception and the aesthetic superiorities with which
mothers and elites seek to socialize the young and
those of lower status, is the struggle with the basic
question: Am I an animal or am I a person? How
do we reconcile the animal nature of the eaters
with the human culture of the cooks, the intractable
fact of the body with the refinements of civilization?
Marketing Implications
This article has been an exploration and stops with
some concluding comments. It has demonstrated
a qualitative approach to the study of consumer
behavior, as follows:
We can enrich our understanding of consumer
behavior by taking consumer protocols as stories
that use a sociocultural vocabulary. The analysis
blends functional-symbolic-structural logics to ob-
serve that a dietary behavior is probably not well
understood in isolation or by focusing narrowly on
REFERENCES
Abelson, Robert P. (1976), "Script Processing in Attitude
Formation and Decision Making," in Cognition and Social
Behavior, J. Carroll and J. Payne, eds., Hillsdale, NJ:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Bellenger, D., KennethL. Bernhardt, andJac L. Goldstucker
60 / Journal of Marketing, Summer 1981
product attributes in the way that much marketing
research does. Soler reminds us of this.
It must be placed into the context of the signs
in the same area of life; together they constitute
a system; and this system in turn must be seen
in relation to the other systems in other areas,
for the interaction of all these systems constitute
the sociocultural system of a people (Soler 1979,
p.25).
Consumer behavior in the food area uses funda-
mental generalizations about the meanings of prod-
ucts in a broadly conventional way, within which
dynamic processes of individuation and differentia-
tion go on. The little myths show how the basic
vocabulary of cooking and eating is used to express
identities by males and females, the young and the
mature, and people in low, middle, and high status
positions. General modeling by age, sex, and social
status is a familiar one to marketers; here the
analysis observes how specific symbolic distinctions
are being made among specific foods, ways of
preparing them, and in some of the ideas they
represent, such as family unity / dispersion, naive-
te / sophistication, routine / festivity, sickness /
health, grossness / subtlety, conformity / deviation,
sacred/profane, etc.
Figure 5 sums up the complex structure of the
food mythology. It is drawn to resemble a three-
dimensional urban scene, suggesting the cultural
sophistication operating to organize biological sta-
tuses, sex roles, age gradings, and social positions
in terms of both psychological dimensions and food
attributes such as taste, texture, appearance, and
method of preparation. The marketer works within
this complex, using the symbolic vocabulary to
define and position the product.
The broad brush strokes indicated above may
encourage further study of how families develop
their particular little myths; how common cultural
little myths change over time; how facts of behavior
are modified in the telling; what the facts or the
modified tellings are being used to say; how marke-
ters participate in creating the symbolic vocabulary;
and how they may use the consumers' mythology
on behalf of their specific products and brands in
their continuing dialog with consumers.
(1976), Qualitative Research in Marketing, Chicago:
American Marketing Association.
Bettelheim, Bruno (1977), The Uses of Enchantment, New
York: Vintage Books.
de Gramont, Sanche (1970), "There Are No Superior Socie-
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Hero, E. Nelson Hayes and Tanya Hayes, eds., Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 3-21.
Firat, A. Fuat (1978), "Social Construction of Consumption
Patterns," unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern
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Frazer, James G. (1927), The Golden Bough: A Study in
Magic and Religion, New York: Macmillan.
Leach, Edmund (1974), Claude Levi-Strauss, New York:
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Levi-Strauss, Claude (1963), Structural Anthropology, Book
I, New York: Basic Books.
- - - (1969), The Raw and the Cooked, Introduction to
a Science of Mythology, I, New York: Harper and Row.
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A Structural Approach to Consumer Behavior / 61
- - - - (1978), The Origins of Table Manners, Introduction
to a Science of Mythology, 3, New York: Harper and
Row.
Levy, Sidney J. (1978), "Hunger and Work in a Civilized
Tribe," American Behavioral Scientist, 21 (March-April),
557-570.
Rapaport, D. (1942), "Principles Underlying Projective
Techniques," Character and Personality, Vol. X, No.
3 (March), pp. 213-219.
Soler, Jean (1979), "The Dietary Prohibitions of the He-
brews," New York Review of Books, 27 (June 14), 24-25.
Williams, Daniel B. (1976), "An Information Processing
Theory of Individual Purchasing Behavior," unpublished
Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University.
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