Groups

A group is a set of people, usually 3 or more, who share the same norms. The members of the group must be able to communicate freely, and develop interdependant roles within the group.

People form groups for different reasons, some of the main being survival and acceptance. It is known that people feel more comfortable if they feel accepted in society, all of which is easier to do in groups. Groups fulfil a persons needs and wants. As Maslow states in his hierarchy of needs, a 'sense of belonging' is within the pyramid as it is vital to a persons lifestyle.

There are different types of groups, friendship groups, work groups, etc. All groups, however, affect the socialisation and behaviour of the people in the group.

For each individual, there are 8 types of group they can be associated with:

Nealry every person has these types of groups to refer to, because the people in their lives fall into different catergories.

Personally these are the people who fall into which group for me:

Reference - Celebrities

Acquired - University groups

Aspirational - Some of the groups i'd turned down

Disassociation - Chavs

Contrived - Working groups

Associative - Working class society

Peer - Friends

Ascribed - Working class society

Each group has different values and norms to other groups. Work groups have different criteria for people to have compared to friendship groups as they value different things from people's characters. Something which is deemed acceptable in one group may be seen as something totally out of order in another. People who want to fit in copy or show the same sort of behaviour that the rest of the people in the group do. This is the same for buying behaviour, as they all buy the same items, or same sort of items when it comes to clothing and shoes. Some people do it subconciously as they are so used to doing it they now do it naturally as they dont want to be kicked out of a group or thought badly of within the group.

This makes it easier for advertisers to market towards the segment they are looking at. By using peoples weaknesses in wanting to belong, advertisers use people of the market in their adverts to show the type of people who are using the products. This makes sure that people buy the product as their sense of belonging is strong.

This advert shows a person using an i-Phone, and that they are on Facebook. This indicates that it is a popular person who is using the product as they have many friends on Facebook. This may try and persuade people who dont perceive themselves as popular to buy the product because they might think they would get more friends by having a product such as this.