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Martin Cadwell

Producers and Social Learning

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Edited by Martin Cadwell, Sunday, 16 Feb 2025, 15:00

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Marketing and beavers

Producers are people, businesses and organisations that make things. In a supply chain these things are called goods. However, it is possible to produce a result without there being anything tangible such as by providing a service, which could even avoid a reciprocal service, monetary remuneration, or other recompense. Hence it is possible to produce an idea, concept, hypothesis or theory. It is possible to produce a flood that damages an area or property. These ideas and calamities are causes of an effect that are the kernels of demand in ‘the wild’.

Ideas and concepts can be innovations or disruptions. Beavers and pranking children can devastate lowlands by diverting or damming streams. Alternatively, beavers create good habitats for wildlife and are exceptionally good at maintaining a status quo once they have flooded an area. Maybe this tangent is a little obscure in its efficacy to be considered to be part of a supply chain but only if we consider the effect beavers solely have on human lives. The beaver collects wood after working as lumberjacks for a while. As a consequence of building a dam it supplies water to an area that previously had only rainfall. Flora and fauna that like wetlands come to the area, some birds arrive as tourists who regard the area as a second home until it gets too cold for them. These plants and animals leave detritus and excrement which adds to the desirability for other plants to settle there and consequently the animal and plant diversity rises. Each one of these plants and animals are stakeholders in the supply chain as producers in a wide and versatile environment.

Humans are much more direct in their nature and harvest materials to produce goods not only for their hungry digestive systems but also for their material enjoyment, comfort and ease. Worse still, they do this for profit. Nonetheless, we must allow this because if businesses and organisations make no profit then taxes collected by governments would have to be on revenue, which would likely put charities out of business.

Producers make tangible goods and conduct intangible services such as washing clean cars. (We can see them do it and sometimes see an improvement).


If we consider the balance of nature that is steadily built over time we can understand how any person can be a major disruptor; it only requires a careful presentation of a setting, circumstance or situation and its fallibility in the face of a determined person to show how there is a significant contrast between something that is valued by many and something else that is valued by a few, or even a single person.

Social Learning

Proposed by Albert Bandura in 1977, he said humans can delay gratification and dispense their own punishments and rewards. We can reflect on our own actions and change future behaviour. This led to the idea that humans learn not from how they respond to situations, but also from how other humans respond to situations. Bandura called this ‘modelling’. In social learning we learn by observing other’s behaviour.

For adolescents, role models include parents, athletes, and entertainers, but parents are the most influential (Martin and Bush, 2004). Parents socialise their children into purchasing and consuming the same brands that they buy, actively teaching them consumer skills – materialistic values and consumption attitudes in their teenage years. Interaction with peers also makes adolescents more aware of different offerings (Moschis and Churchill, 1978). Research indicates that those who read reviews are twice as likely to select a product compared with those who do not (Senecal and Nantal, 2004).


Some citing (above) can no longer be referenced to the original source I chose, some years ago; I didn't know how to properly cite and reference sources when I researched for the above piece. I think anyone can cut and paste the names and dates (above) and get an online source that signifies that the named people did research that I sourced and allude to here.

References

Martin and Bush, (2004), Sports Celebrity Influence on the behavioural intentions of Generation Y,
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4733686_Sports_Celebrity_Influence_on_the_Behavioral_Intentions_of_Generation_Y


Reference for Albert Bandura 1977

McLeod, Saul, 'Albert Bandura's Social Learning Theory', Simply Psychology, https://www.simplypsychology.org/bandura.html


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