You Are What You Eat – And The Company You Keep: A Qualitative Study of What Makes Contemporary Consumers Choose a Consumption Practice Deviating from the Norm, What They Achieve From it and How This Insight Can Be Relevant to Marketers

Increasingly, contemporary consumers are released from traditionalidentity anchors such as family, class and other social groups.Consumer culture theorists argue that consumers instead turn to themarket in order to form identities and create communities with peersthrough consumption. Based on this argument, much research haslooked at what influences consumers in their search for meaningthrough consumption. In marketing classes at CBS focus hastraditionally been given to the issue of how brands can attaininfluential positions and play an important role in a givenconsumption context: how do brands affect consumers’ choices.Contrary, Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) opens up to theunderstanding of an interdependent relationship between the marketand the consumers, which influences the consumers’ search formeaningful consumption. Through the lens of CCT this qualitativestudy researched how consumers choose a certain consumptionpractice, which is not in accordance with, or controlled by, anoverarching brand. How do they choose and what do they obtainfrom it? And what are the managerial implications of such alternativeconsumer choices? The empirical data stem from the active group ofLow Carb High Fat (LCHF) followers (Ølgod 2015).