Consumer Identities

According to the Oxford Dictionary

"The action or process of identifying someone or something" 

"A person's sense of identity with someone or something"

"The association or linking of one thing or another"

"A man's self is the sum total of all that he CAN call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife & children, his ancestors & friends, his reputation & works, his lands, and yacht and bank account". 

"All these things give him the same emotions. If they wax and prosper, he feels triumphant; if they dwindle and die away, he feels cast down - not necessarily in the same degree for each thing, but in much the same way at all". 

Possessions extend our sense of self

• Reaffirming or aspirational

Varying levels of Importance

Think of the feeling when you lose something that is important to you. 

Belk (1988) 

Extend the self through possessions by...

• Owning or controlling
• Creating or making
• Knowing or understanding

"A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognise him and carry an image of him in their mind"

(James, 1890) 

• Identification with a label - Golfer, runner, mother, wedding planner
• Performed in a relation to other people
• Related to specific social contexts
• Consider a mother or father that consume an event with their children one week and friends the next

Pre-socialisation

|

ReDiscovery

|

ReConstruction 

|

Maintenance

|

Disengagement = Identity Latency / Identity Disengagement 

Enculturation - Cultural group membership

Awareness of role schemas

Schemas vary based on social variables; Class, gender, age etc

"Outsider's" understanding

"Is this the type of person I'd like to become?"

• Experimentation - Identity experimation (i.e. possession errors) 
• Pursuit - Identity insiders shape discovery process 
• Fit - Consumer evaluates fit 

• Conscious decision to pursue the identity
• Occurs in a network of Identity actors
• Accrual of possessions & skills for performance
• 'Outsider' to 'Insider' Evolution
• Internalisation of Identity

Identity Veteran - Refining

Possessions reflect status

Skilled consumer

Complete break from activity (Disengagement) 

Hiatus from Activity (Latency)

"Two or more individuals who share a common social identification of themselves or perceive themselves to be members of the same social category" 

Psychological or imagined entity

Point of reference for

• Dress
• Language
• Behaviour
• Thought

Anderson 2006, Tajfel & Turner 1979

Homogenising

• We identify w/ groups with which we share values/beliefs
• Branf fortunes reflect our fortunes
• Basis for homegeneous behaviour & thought
• Group identification is oppositional - Windows / Apple

Bhattacharya 1995,Muriz & Guinn 2001, Taifel 1974

• Aspirational
• Distinctive - "Defining who you are by what you are not"
• Associative & Dissociative (White & Dahl 2006)

• Avoidance Groups (Distance themselves from a group) 

- Avoid anything that might identify from w/ that group

- Rebellious adolescents may deliverately do the opposite of what their parents would look like 

- Groups that some consumers might purposely try to distance themselve from 

- The motivation to distance oneself from a negative reference group can be as powerful or more powerful than the desire to please a positive group 

Normative Compliance

• Consuming according to in-group conventions & norms

Normative Interpretation

• Framework to understand behaviours of others

Social Influence - Principle of social proof

Influence of others on how we consume (Cialdini 1993)

• Neo Tribes (Maffesoli 1996) - not like a marget segment, consists of varied consumers w/ different demographics features who are capable of a collective action. 

- Formed through acts of consumption & self expression they are formed entirely through individual decision.

- No boundaries/rules form involvement, no authorities or admission committees. 

• End of social structure & enduring group memberships
• Brief Tribes fromed through lifestyles, tastes, dress etc. (Bennett 2004, Maffesoli 1996) 

• Transient, temporal and appearance based

• Fluid, ephemeral and unstable yet command intense emotional involvement from their members