First Advisor

Jim Beriault

Date of Award

Summer 8-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Business Administration: Advertising Management and University Honors

Department

Business

Language

English

Subjects

brand belonging, consistency, conditioned response, ski culture, symbolic capital, subcultural conformity

Abstract

Purpose: Ski culture sells freedom and enforces conformity. This review asks what unconscious behavioral patterns hold that contradiction in place, and how brands capitalize on it to manufacture belonging.

Design/Methodology/Approach: A narrative literature review across consumer psychology, behavioral neuroscience, sociology, and ski industry research. No primary data were collected. Four accounts of consistency-seeking are synthesized into one framework, then applied to three ski industry cases at ascending scales and tested against a comparative case from Spanish football.

Findings: Belonging is a conditioned response, and conditioning requires a stable stimulus. Consistency is therefore the precondition of belonging rather than a constraint on it. The system holds only while participants do not perceive it as a system. Survey evidence from a Norwegian ski brand shows the cost of breaking that condition: prompting skiers to think about a brand is the one experience dimension that lowers brand attitude. Freedom and conformity are not opposites. Freedom is what a fully absorbed code feels like from inside. Brands can supply that code deliberately, but only at scales where a single actor controls the variables: demonstrable intent varies inversely with the scale of the effect.

Comments

An undergraduate honors thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Science in University Honors, Business Administration: Marketing, and Business Administration: Advertising Management

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/45106

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