Reading: Social Factors
People Influencing People
Social factors represent another important set of influences on consumer behaviour. Specifically, these are the effects of people and groups influencing one another through culture and subculture, social class, reference groups, and family.
Culture exerts a strong influence on a person’s needs and wants because it is through culture that we learn how to live, what to value, and how to conduct ourselves in society. Canadian culture is often referred to as a “Canadian mosaic” because of our multicultural society. We tend to look at a general culture that is common to all Canadians. That said, Canada’s culture is heavily influenced by the Western (European) French and English populations, yet two other significant groups influence Canadian culture, First Nations as well as recent immigrants to Canada. There are more than 600 First Nations communities in Canada with over 1.4 million people that identify themselves as aboriginal. The Canadian government has set significant growth targets for new Canadians that make this fourth group one that can’t be ignored. The Canadian government’s latest target is to welcome one million immigrants between 2020 -2022. According to Statistics Canada, Asia was Canada’s largest source of immigrants between 2006-2011, although the share of immigration from Africa, Caribbean, Central and South America increased slightly.[1]
Marketing strategies targeted to people with a common cultural heritage might demonstrate how a product or service reinforces these traditional values. There are three components of culture that members of that culture share: beliefs, values, and customs. As discussed in the prior section, a belief is a proposition that reflects a person’s particular knowledge or opinion of something. Values are general statements that guide behaviour and influence beliefs. The function of a value system is to help people choose between alternatives in everyday life and prioritize choices that are most important to them personally.
The University of Waterloo publishes a Canadian Index of Wellbeing (CIW) that measures Canadian values.
It begins with the belief that our cornerstone value as Canadians is the principle of “shared destiny”: that our society is often best shaped through collective action; that there is a limit to how much can be achieved by individuals acting alone; that the sum of a good society and what it can achieve is greater than the remarkably diverse parts which constitute it.
From this cornerstone principle of shared destiny and collective action, and from extensive public consultations with Canadians, a number of core consensus values informed the development of the CIW:
| fairness | diversity | equity |
| inclusion | health | safety |
| economic security | democracy | sustainability |
Canadians said quite clearly that their top priorities for quality of life were: primary and secondary education, health care access, a healthy environment, clean