★ Finnish Consumer Ethos: value and service design★
（Today’s lecture is by far the most appealing one to me ☺）
One question
What is the virtuous consumers? The key words come to my mind is “rational consumption” “sustainable” “green consumption”. Actually, people from different places would have different perspectives towards this questions. For Finnish, maybe it is not hard to consume eco-friendly while in other country like China, it will be an outstanding behavior. It is diverse cultures that shape multiple attitudes towards consumption.
Two models of consumption
Based on attitudes towards consumption, two cultural models exist in Europe(or maybe similar in other regions): the puritan vs the hedonist.
The puritan，modest model is the dominant in Finland. Many people have moderate attitude towards consumption and a strong mind of eco-friendly. Maybe that is because Finland society is relatively young and people still keep the memories when they are lack of materials and stuff.
On the other hand, people who are the hedonist, are the playful, high-living consumer who seek the meaning and self-gratification through consumption here and now, in the present. For example, in China, many young people nowadays struggle in big city but still equip themselves with fancy bags and electronic products. The increasing popularity of online shopping also encourage them to buy more and more clothes and shoes which are good-looking and trendy but always not to be worn for years.
Emotions and needs
Also consumption is somehow related to gender. There are many stories of irrational and impulsive shopping female and sensitive male. From the ancient times, the emotion has been traditionally linked to feminine side of a subject, whereas reasons have been liked to masculine rational side.
Consumer Ethos
There are several kinds of consumer ethos below:
- Ethos of agrarianism.
Some men in Finland still take building a house by their own hand as the work they should do .
- Ethos of Economism.
(That is what we are gonna discussion in the poster, i.e. keeping the things you buy for a long time, like a promise and marriage to the objects.)
- Ethos of hedonism
- Ethical and green consumerism
- Being youthful and healthy.
When talking about this part, the lecturer asked one question about the definition of success in our own country. What surprised me is that the first word come up from the Finnish which define success is “education”. The importance and significance Finland put on education does lead in the world.
Consumer thinking
Speaking of consumers behavior and experience, we are introduced the cases of Nokia. As is known, Nokia value its products and service as technology-driven, which had improved its market significantly in more than 20 years.
But with the born of iPhone, Nokia lost its coins because “the
market has gone from being dictated by mobile technology to being dictated by the consumer” . For example, iPhone will promote the phone with hole in the corner to the Japanese market, which might be seen as ridiculous by Nokia. But that design is actually based on the using habit of mobile phone in Japan. So you see, who is more concern about the consumer, who would be more probably the winner.
Interestingly, Finland seems has less companies which has a superb international consumer business, e.g. compared with Sweden with ikea, Volvo and h&m.
