Understanding the consumer

Cécile CHAMARET is a former student of the École Normale Supérieure de Cachan, an associate professor in Economics and Management and a doctor in management from the École Polytechnique. She is a lecturer in the MIE department of the École Polytechnique and a researcher at i3-CRG. Her work focuses on consumer behavior in situations of technological innovation or deviance (counterfeiting).

From 2012 to 2017, she worked as an assistant professor at Paris Sorbonne Abu Dhabi University and developed field research on the behavior of consumers in the Arabian Gulf regarding luxury products.

She has published in French (DM, E&H) and international (IJRDM, JBR) journals and regularly participates in major international conferences (EGOS, EURAM, AMS).

Tell us about your research background!

I began research during my thesis on strategic and technological issues by trying to understand how markets confronted with the process of commoditization are structured and evolve: what happens when a product considered new and innovative gradually becomes a commodity? How does the market restructure? Around which actors? This led me to work on search engines in particular. In the tradition of the CRG, I have a research approach that is very focused on the field. When I arrived in the Emirates to teach at the Sorbonne Abu Dhabi, I was very surprised by the consumption behavior of the Emiratis and struck by a paradox: their per capita income is one of the highest in the world, they are big consumers of luxury products and yet experience shows that they are also big consumers of counterfeit products. With Julia Pueschel and Béatrice Parguel we therefore set up a research program around the consumption behavior of luxury products in the Emirates. We conducted dozens of fascinating interviews with Emiratis to understand their underlying motivations. This research has been published in Journal Business Research, among others.[1].

Traditionally, the perception of different types of risks (risk of poor product performance, probability of incurring a criminal risk, social risk if friends or family detect that one is wearing a fake, etc.) is a factor that slows down the consumption of counterfeit products. For Emirati consumers, we note that certain risks, such as legal risk, are not perceived at all. This is easily explained since locally only counterfeit sellers are sanctioned. On the other hand, they do perceive certain types of risks, particularly social risk and product risk. Under these conditions, we sought to highlight the strategies they adopt to reduce this form of dissonance between strong perception of a risk and taking action. We identified four main strategies. The first, we call it the A-quality strategy. For the counterfeit consumer, this involves selecting only very good quality products, some of which can cost the equivalent of several thousand euros. They thus limit the probability of being discovered by their social circle. The second strategy is that of the "black chameleon". This involves mixing real and fake products depending on the types of products (visible or not) and the moments. For example, at weddings, which are the social events par excellence, individuals will prefer to wear original products rather than fakes, the perceived social risk being too great. The "fashionista" strategy consists of favoring fakes for very recent or limited edition products in order to make comparison with real products more difficult. Finally, our Emirati consumers implement what we call the "believer" strategy by often recalling the immoral dimension of spending too much on luxury products to justify their choice to consume fakes. The amount that is then saved can then contribute to helping the poor through zakat, one of the pillars of Islam.

These findings have strong implications both for brands seeking to combat counterfeiting and for governments seeking to better understand the measures that could divert consumers from this type of behavior.

What are your upcoming plans?

I continue to work on counterfeit consumption in the Emirates. During a data collection, we discovered an interesting phenomenon that goes against European practices: there is a positive correlation between age and the consumption of counterfeit products. However, in Europe, it is rather young people who consume this type of product. We are therefore conducting research to better understand this trend.

In addition, I would like to develop new research projects still linked to consumer behavior but on new themes such as resistance to innovation.