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Social Animals

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Submitted By Vmunchen9
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Aristotle famously declared, “Man is by nature a social animal.” Human-beings inherently communicate, interact, and influence one another. A group, defined is: “A number of individuals assembled together who share a set of norms, values, attitudes, or beliefs.” Group membership has been recognized for years as the determinant of human behavior. People act in accordance to the shared norms, values, attitudes, and beliefs of the groups they belong to, as well as the groups they aspire to belong to. Throughout the years, marketing researchers and sociologists have discovered how to use reference groups, “Groups that serve as frames of reference for individuals in their consumption decisions because they are perceived as credible sources” (Schiffman, 2010), in order to successfully target their markets and influence consumer behavior. Researchers have identified several different forms of reference groups that consumers compare themselves to before making purchasing decisions. With the current boom of online social networking sites such as, “www.facebook.com, www.myspace.com, and www.youtube.com,” group influence is a pivotal part of consumer behavior today. After discovering the history of how group influence emerged, followed by how group influence fits into the consumer behavior discipline, this paper will explore how current marketing practitioners can apply understanding of group influence in order to effectively reach target markets.
The earliest research conducted in the field of group influence as it pertains to modern consumer behavior dates back to the late 1950’s. Robert King Merton (1910-2003) was a distinguished American sociologist, as well as the father of the reference group. Merton’s development of reference group theories laid important groundwork for consumer behaviorists to come, and to expand on through the years. In his theories, he noted how,

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