There is no place like home: Poverty and the squatter house

Abstract

The house is one of the most important possessions in individuals' lives and consumers perform several practices in order to turn this spatial product into a home.Building on the existing research on home and home possessions, the article challenges the western romantic notion of home by investigating poor migrant consumers' lived experiences with a spatial product that has material deficiencies and it is perceived as inferior by the members of the dominant host culture. Accordingly, this study explores how migrant and at the same time poor consumers turn the squatter house into a home. Through an ethnographic research, the research findings show how spatial, material, symbolic, social, and temporal dimensions shape the private sphere of home and how consumers individually and collectively negotiate all these of forces in order to turn the stigmatized dwelling into a home.

Stigma in marketing and consumer research: A literature review and research agenda

“…Jacob et al (2022) investigate how SES influences consumers' price sensitivity. Omeraki Çekirdekci (2020) focuses on poor migrant consumers' lived experiences. Saatcioglu and Corus (2014) take a multidimensional look into the lives of impoverished consumers.…”

“…Those papers explore stigmatized consumers' reactions to such attempts, thus revealing the effectiveness of destigmatization strategies in the marketplace. Most of the papers emphasizing the process of stigmatization show how stigma can be devastating to individuals, negatively impacting their well‐being (e.g., Jerez‐Jerez & Melewar, 2020; Larson & Bock, 2016), social life (e.g., Omeraki Çekirdekci, 2020; Saatcioglu & Corus, 2014), and health (e.g., Achar et al, 2022; Cruz et al, 2018).…”

Understanding high‐involvement product purchase through an innovative machine learning approach: A case of housing type choice

“…As the consumer interest in a product increases, consumer product involvement increases, and customers will go through a more sophisticated decision‐making process due to various factors (Adenan et al, 2018). Although prior studies assume that the purchase antecedents have a linear and direct influence on consumer choices (Liao et al, 2015), these factors may have a complex relationship due to the intricacy of purchasing high involvement products, of which housing is a typical example (Omeraki Çekirdekci, 2020; Senthilmurugan et al, 2020). The current rate of urbanisation and modernisation has broadened the real estate market (Ronald, 2009).…”