Opennes to change and aesthetic self. A research contribution with a group of coiffeur customers

Introduction The incidence of the brand on the customer's “choice” is a key point for the psycho-social research on experiential, emotional and multi-sensory marketing (Ferraresi and Schmitt, 2006). Choosing a cosmetic or another could belong more to the multi-sensory features of the label than to its quality; in the presence of reminders to the food industry (i.e., honey shampoo or a blueberry-flavoured body cream) the customer tends to more positive attitudes towards buying and preferentially choosing that product. We can hypothesize that the tendency to positively evaluate the non-traditional label, typical of the Aesthetic Self market, correlates with the openness to change. Hypotheses This research aims to verify if and how much on a group of coiffeur customers: a) the “food” kind of a semantic label used for the description of the hair colour (i.e. liquorice nuance) influences the subjective representation more than the “traditional” one (i.e. black); b) openness to change positively correlates with the Aestethic Self representation and the “food” semantic label; c) the cultural context influences the representation of the product and the openness to change. Participants The sample consists of a group of customers (women from 20 to 60 years old) of some coiffeur salons distributed in three different areas (the poor, the central and the residential ones) in the city of Catania. Methodology Materials – Questionnaire for the background questions (age, profession, kind and frequency of the services), with the likert measurement scales for the evaluation of the attitudes related to the level of personal satisfaction for the aesthetic image and the importance given to the motivation of the aesthetic care; n.2 Semantic Differentials (Osgood et alii, 1959; Licciardello e Di Nuovo, 1997) related to the actual and future Aesthetic Self; the Big Five Questionnaire for Adults (Barbaranelli et alii, 2003), related to the dimension of the “openness to change” (14 items on a scale using anchors of 1: hardly ever and 5: almost always); n.2 Semantic Differentials for the measurement of the representation of the “hair colour” with two different labels, a “traditional” and a “food” one (i.e. black Vs liquorice). Procedures – Administration individually (carried by a research professor) in the coiffeur saloons. Results We expect that the “food” kind of semantic label used in defining the hair colour influences the representation of the product more that the “traditional” one; that the openness of mind positively correlates with the Aesthetic representation of the Self and the food semantic label; that the results will be influenced by the context which the sample belongs to.