Instructions

Analyze the following passage and provide appropriate answers for the questions that follow.

Either explicitly or implicitly, our informants suggest that the objects that transfix them are hoped to be conduits to, rather than surrogates for, love, respect, recognition, status, security, escape, or attractiveness. These are the social relations we desire, consciously or subconsciously, beneath the objects that we find so compelling. The value of the objects that we focus our longing upon inheres less in the object or in a Lacanian search for childhood love than in the culture. The hope for the hope that an altered state of being may result keeps the cycle of desire moving. Desires are nurtured by self-embellished fantasies of a wholly different self, and they may be stimulated by external sources, including advertising, retail displays, films, television programs, stories told by other people, and the consumption behavior of real or imaginary others. But we find that the person who feels strong desire has almost always actively stimulated this desire by attending, seeking out, entertaining, and embellishing such images. The desires that occupy us are vivid and riveting fantasies that we participate in nurturing, growing, and pursuing, through self-seduction.

The social nature of desire implies that preferences of consumers are far from being independent. Yet, choice models assume that preferences of consumers act as individuals. The mimetic aspect of desire creates difficulties for using individual attitude or intention measures to predict adoption of new products whose use will be visible. The notion of desire we have derived suggests that the appeal of the desired object is not inherent in the object itself. Models that begin with preferences for product attributes or benefits are therefore problematic. The consumer, individually and jointly, has a role in constructing the object of desire, within a social context. What makes consumer desire attach to a particular object is not so much the object’s particular characteristics as the consumer’s own hopes for an altered state of being,involving an altered set of social relationships.

Question 27

Consider the statement given below as true:
“Men use the plasticity of consumer identity construction to forge atavistic masculine identities
based upon an imagined life of self-reliant, pre-modern men who lived outside the confines of
cities, families, and work bureaucracies.” Which of the following statements would concur with the above idea and the theme of the main paragraph?

Solution

In the last paragraph it is given that how being social will satisfy customer's desire of masculine identity. Among the given options, option D is the most appropriate one. The answer is option D.


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