Jill G. Klein and Laura Huang
Executive Summary
On December 26, 2004, a tsunami tore through the coastlines of India, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia. In Thailand, the focus of the current research, entire coastal villages were destroyed, and up to 8000 people died. Children were particularly affected by the disaster. Specifically, 1480 children lost one or both parents, and 50,000 were considered direct victims of the tragedy.
The authors focus on adolescents as a potentially vulnerable segment that can be overlooked by relief efforts. Research suggests that traumatic events can leave adolescents confused about their personal identity and feeling that they are outsiders trying to cope with separation from their previous world. There are multiple ways that disaster survivors can regain a sense of normalcy and connection to their predisaster lives. The focus of this article is on the role of material goods in the recovery process.
The authors conducted multiple interviews with ten adolescents (six boys and four girls) from February 2006 to June 2006. The teens were between the ages of 13 and 15. The informants had suffered significant losses in the tsunami. All had lost friends and acquaintances, two had lost a parent, and some had lost other relatives. Furthermore, they had lost almost all their possessions, and their homes had been either completely destroyed or severely damaged.
This research with these teenage tsunami survivors finds that adolescents received little support from relief organizations in their desire to replace lost possessions. Although there was a great deal of relief activity in the village, including building playgrounds and the giving toys to younger children, there was a strong sense that teens had been overlooked by these efforts. The authors find that in the first weeks after the tsunami, teens desired possessions would bring comfort, help pass time in some engaging way, and allow for sharing and interaction. Furthermore, the adolescents that were interviewed were motivated to help others, particularly family members. However, in most cases, the teens were not given the opportunity to become involved in relief efforts.
The authors suggest ways marketers can help relief organizations identify the material needs of adolescent survivors, as well as the needs of other underserved or vulnerable segments. This research shows that not all material possessions are of equal importance to the adolescent survivor; that is, some items are viewed as replaceable, whereas others are not. Thus, helping teens to repossess requires an understanding of their needs, self-perceptions, and attitudes toward their possessions. Such an understanding is a strength of marketing practitioners in industries such as clothing, music, and toys, among others, but is probably not a competency of most relief organizations that focus their efforts on emergency activities. Thus, there is an obvious role for marketing in helping provide disaster survivors with the things they need. We suggest a specific process and methodology that can be used in future disasters to identify the material needs of adolescents.
Biography
Jill G. Klein is Associate Professor of Marketing at INSEAD. She received her PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Michigan in 1990. During the following seven years, she was a member of faculty in the Marketing Department at Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University, and spent periods as a visiting professor at Bond University School of Business, Queensland, Australia; Helsinki School of Economics and Business Administration, Finland; and The Fuqua School of Business, Duke University. She joined the INSEAD faculty in 1997. Jill Klein's teaching specialties are marketing management, consumer behavior, advertising/marketing communications and marketing research. Her research interests are consumer boycotts, corporate social responsibility, and international marketing, including the effects of international hostility on consumer perceptions of foreign products. She has had articles published in Journal of Marketing, Harvard Business Review, Management Science, Journal of International Business Studies, and British Medical Journal.
Laura Huang received her MBA from INSEAD in 2005 and has since been working in Client Relations for the financial industry, with a focus on client sales and marketing. Previously, she worked in the pharmaceutical domain in technical sales and marketing. Laura graduated from Duke University with a master's degree in Engineering and a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering. She is currently applying to PhD programs in Organizational Behavior. Her research interests are decision making and negotiations, as well as in cross-cultural settings. She has had journalistic articles published in various press publications, such as the Financial Times and L'Express magazine.
Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, Vol. 26, No. 2, Fall 2007
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