THE ETHICAL CONSUMER AND THE USE OF MAFIA STEREOTYPES IN MARKETING. A STUDY INTO CONSUMERS’ ATTITUDES AND WILLINGNESS TO BUY

Abstract

Over time popular media has used the idea of Italian Mafia and the related image of mobsters in TV series, movies, and cartoons. The overall image surrounding Mafia is so powerful that nowadays many people associate the name Mafia to The Godfather movie or other fictional images. In addition to this, there are also businesses that offer products and services branded with names that remind the idea of Mafia, despite, in reality, the Mafia is a violent criminal organisation involved in drug trafficking, human trafficking, murders, etc. However, marketing research has never studied consumers’ attitudes towards the use of these stereotypes in marketing and their willingness to buy products and services that use them. This research tries to fill this gap and, by adopting Forsyth’s (1980) ethical ideologies questions, it studies the links between consumers’ ethical ideologies and: 1) consumers’ attitudes towards these products and services; 2) consumers’ willingness to buy them in order to understand whether there are differences between relativists and ideologists consumers. This research is based on an online survey made up of open and closed-ended questions. Section one of the survey was made up of closed-ended questions aimed at studying ethical ideologies; section two was made up of a mix of open- and closedended questions aimed at understanding the perceptions that respondents had towards the Mafia; their degree of acceptance towards the use of the Mafia for commercial purposes; and their willingness to buy Mafia-inspired products; the last section included some demographic questions. The survey was made available via Qualtrics and respondents were recruited through Prolific. In the end 152 responses from UK participants were collected. Data analysis has not been carried out yet, but it is expected to analyse data through the Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA), a new data analysis technique that is aimed at identifying necessary, but not sufficient conditions within data. In addition to this, analysis of group differences will be carried out through ANOVA, in conjunction with regression analysis. Through this research it is expected to be able to understand whether consumers’ attitudes towards the use of Mafia stereotypes in marketing and their willingness to buy products and services that use these stereotypes differ according to whether consumers are classified as relativists or ideologists. With this study it is expected to analyse an area of consumption that so far has been neglected by research, i.e. consumers’ attitudes and willingness to buy products and services that use Mafia-related stereotypes.