Intepreting Consumer Mythology: A Structural Approach to Consumer Behavior

Consumer behavior depth interviews are grouped with other kinds of story telling—fairy tales, novels, psychological test responses, and myths—as imaginative statements that can be qualitatively interpreted for their functional and symbolic content. Drawing upon the Claude Lévi-Strauss approach to the analysis of myths, a structuralist interpretation illustrates application to the age, sex, and social status dimensions of food consumption.