Kerry Chipp
Kerry Chipp, researcher and senior lecturer at the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS), focuses on consumer behaviour, a sub-discipline of marketing, and on consumer value proposition (CVP) development. She seeks to understand consumer transformation through social mobility, or the lack thereof, in a materialistic, heavily marketed, environment. Her book, E-commerce in Dynamic Markets (forthcoming), and papers on a resurgence of pride in local identities and identity formation, transformation and assertion on the global stage, seek to understand the landscapes of contemporary consumer identity in emerging markets.
Her research shows that consumer identity is shaped by economic, cultural and technological change, and that the connection between socio-economic states is one of time as opposed to inherited identity. Consumers move up and down the pyramid, maintaining and establishing ties with others across and within their own class structures. Consumer identity in these circumstances is forged through progress and mobility, or plagued with negativity due to a lack of mobility and exclusion. While it is a truism in developing regions of the world that people live and work alongside those from different social classes and circumstances, ‘bottom of the pyramid’ consumers often feel included or excluded on the basis of their consumer behaviour.
Her paper, “A little respect: CVP development and the low-income consumer”, on consumer identities constructed through a maze of networks, won the best paper award at the Emerging Markets Conference Board conference held in 2015, an annual conference co-chaired by Professor Naresh Malhotra, one of the world’s ‘marketing legends’.
