Abstract:

The emotional and financial upheavals occasioned by separation and divorce have lasting effects in many areas including peoples' behaviour and attitudes as consumers, even after they are re-married. Some of these changes are essentially functional as women find they are forced to play a part in traditionally male dominated categories like banking, insurance and household maintenance. A second set of product and service categories is affected by the needs of people in their mid-thirties building new social lives and establishing new household and family units. However, there is also a more general and wider range effect in the way that housewives who have been through these traumas take a less tolerant view of brands and their advertising. They have experienced real emotions very sharply. They resist the trivialisation of emotion, or the association of emotion with brands or decisions that they see as increasingly trivial.