Influence of the community on consumption behaviours

Communities and their specific consumptions is a fundamental subject to understand our world which is, most of the time, different from what we already know. In a period of globalization and of profound changes in human relations, it is important to understand other cultures, other spiritualities and other conceptions of life. Marc Aurelius said “We are the other of the other”, which means that our conception of the world is not the right answer, but one of the possible answers. This research studies the relation between the consumption and community. The purpose of this thesis is to identify the key elements that influence the consumption of an individual within a community, the impact of the community members on the community consumption behaviour, and how industries and professionals could answer to the community needs in terms of products and services. In addition, we have made a focus on the influence of a specific member of a community: the leader. To be more precise, the research fulfils different objectives which are: first, to review and identify key principles of communities, from existing literature; second, to adopt a 360° study method which allows us to have an overview of our problem by collecting data from different actors of the subject (Opinion leaders, professionals and customers); The literature review and this qualitative data collection helped us to identify the key elements which lead and determine the relation between consumption and communities. With this purpose in mind, we were motivated to collect qualitative primary data through an interpretivism paradigm. We conducted semi-structured interviews with open questions with selected participants who have a key role in the community. The main objective of the interviews was to gain a comprehensive and reliable perception of the situation from different key points of view. Our main goal is to identify what are the key elements in the relation between communities and consumption. On this road, we also wanted to know why a community is tightening on its practices and if their consumption may attract non-members of the community