Identity Signaling with Social Capital: A Model of Symbolic Consumption

Berger, Jonah; Ho, Benjamin; Joshi, Yogesh V.

doi:10.2139/ssrn.1828848

Cited by 7 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 64 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…She tried to fall under the radar to avoid provoking others’ envy (Wu et al , 2017) and judgment. Another informant, Yasser, described his style as “elegant, low profile and timeless.” When probed beyond his perceptions of fashion, he revealed that making different fashion choices were too risky so he chose “a classic style.” Compared to previous studies that found consumers choosing inconspicuous luxury purchased for its aesthetics, utility, or associative or dissociative motives (Berger et al , 2011; Han et al , 2010), we found that Luxe Conservatives are unique in their choices of inconspicuous luxury fashion but motivated by fears of making wrong fashion choices. Inconspicuousness remains a safe bet.…”

Section: A Typology Of Inconspicuous Luxury Consumerscontrasting

confidence: 99%

The anatomy of the inconspicuous luxury fashion experience

Makkar

Yap

2018

JFMM

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to address the following questions: how do consumers construct meaning around their inconspicuous luxury fashion experiences? What desires do inconspicuous consumers strive to fulfill? What sentiments do they associate with their inconspicuous luxury fashion consumption? Design/methodology/approach This exploratory research begins with a netnographic study of 11 online luxury blogs followed by in-depth interviews and home observations of ten luxury consumers with inconspicuous preferences in Dubai. Findings Inconspicuous choices are not simply for associative or dissociative motivations but several symbolic consumption schemas come into play. A typology of inconspicuous luxury fashion consumers has emerged: fashion influencers, trendsetters, fashion followers, and luxe conservatives. Practical implications The findings have potential to yield important managerial implications for fashion retailers and brand communications. The typology of inconspicuous consumers provides a basis for developing a more targeted relationship marketing program for luxury fashion brands. Originality/value This research advances luxury knowledge in fashion and consumer behavior research by unveiling how consumers construct meanings around their inconspicuous consumption. The typology developed in this study marks the starting point for further extensions to explore the complexities of inconspicuous luxury consumers, which are grounded in the roles they take on in society, how they plan their luxury consumption journey and how they eventually use these possessions for self-identification and communication to others.

show abstract

Section: A Typology Of Inconspicuous Luxury Consumerscontrasting

confidence: 99%

The anatomy of the inconspicuous luxury fashion experience

Makkar

Yap

2018

JFMM

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In general, the fashion game can be equivalently taken as a heterogeneous network game consisting of three base games: (pure) coordination game, (pure) anti-coordination game 13 , and Matching Pennies. To be precise, when a conformist meets a rebel, they play Matching Pennies.…”

Section: Model Descriptionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fashion and Homophily

Zhang

Cao

Qin

et al. 2018

Operations Research

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Fashion, as a "second nature" to human being, plays a quite non-trivial role not only in economy but also in many other areas of our society, including education, politics, arts, and even academics. We investigate fashion through a network game model, which is referred to as the fashion game, where there are two types of agents, conformists and rebels, who are allocated on a network. Each agent has two actions to choose, and interacts only with her neighbors. Conformists prefer to match the majority action among her neighbors while rebels like to mismatch. Theoretically, the fashion game is a network extension of three elementary games, namely coordination game, anti-coordination game, and matching pennies. We are especially interested in how social interaction structures affect the evolution of fashion. The conclusion is quite clean: homophily, in general, inhibits the emergence of fashion cycles. To establish this, two techniques are applied, i.e. the best response dynamics and a novel partial potential analysis. * This is a sister working paper with: Zhi-gang Cao, Cheng-zhong Qin, Xiao-guang Yang, Bo-yu Zhang, A heterogeneous network game perspective of fashion cycle.

show abstract

“…In his well-cited work Theory of Leisure Class (Veblen, 1899;Bagwell et al, 1996), Veblen suggests that the wealthy consume and waste goods with a desire to signal their wealth and elite status, and their need to attain social status stems from the need for social recognition. A signicant number of studies in economics, marketing, and psychology focus on understanding the need for status including the use of counterfeits (Wilcox et al, 2009), signalling via non-conformity and brand prominence (Han et al, 2010) and how rms can take advantage of this need (Chaudhuri and Majumdar, 2006;Ordabayeva and Chandon, 2011;Berger et al, 2011;Ferraro et al, 2013;Wang and Griskevicius, 2014). A stream of studies in marketing focus on status and vice goods investigating their pricing and competitive strategy (Pesendorfer, 1995;Amaldoss and Jain, 2005a,b;Kuksov and Xie, 2012;Yoganarasimhan, 2012;Jain, 2012;Tereyagoglu and Veeraraghavan, 2012;Kuksov and Wang, 2013;Rao and Schaefer, 2013;Amaldoss and Jain, 2015) and oering them as limited edition and scarce goods (Balachander and Stock, 2009).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%