Conspicuous Consumption - Distinctions of Type

Distinctions of Type

Since the 19th-century coinage of the term conspicuous consumption, and its denotation of “consumption-as-status”, Thorstein Veblen’s sociologic and economic propositions have been broadened and deepened to comprehend and describe the socio-economic behaviours that people practice in the contemporary pursuit of social prestige.

• Definitions

A contemporary dictionary definition: “conspicuous consumption” is the buying of many things, especially expensive things, that are not necessary to one’s life, and which purchases are done in a way that will make people take notice of the spending of money. In the Journal of Economic Issues article “Veblen, Bourdieu, and Conspicuous Consumption” (2001), A. Trigg defined conspicuous consumption as the behaviours whereby a man or a woman can display great wealth by means of idleness—such as expending much time in the practice of leisure activities, and spending much money to consume luxury goods and services.

• Self-worth

In the book Income, Saving and the Theory of Consumer Behavior (1949), J.S. Duesenberry proposed that a person’s conspicuous consumption psychologically depends not only upon the actual level of spending, but also depends upon the degree of his or her spending, as compared with and to the spending of other people. That the conspicuous consumer is motivated by the importance, to him or to her, of the opinion of the social and economic reference groups for whom are performed the patterns of conspicuous consumption.

• Aggressive ostentation

In 2009, the television reporter Dick Meyer (CBS News) proposed that conspicuous consumption is a form of anger towards society, an “aggressive ostentation” that is an antisocial behaviour, which arose from the social alienation suffered by men, women, and families who feel they have become anonymous in and to their societies. The feeling of alienation is aggravated by the decay of the communitarian ethic essential to a person feeling him or herself part of the whole society.

• Shelter and transport

In the U.S. of the 1950s, there began the trend towards building over-sized houses, domestic dwellings that were larger-than-needed, by the nuclear family; fifty years later, in the year 2000, such a practice in conspicuous consumption resulted in people buying large houses that were double the average size required to comfortably house a nuclear family. The negative consequences of either buying or of building an over-sized house was either the loss or the reduction of the family’s domestic recreational space—either the back yard or the front yard, or both; the spending of old-age retirement funds to pay for a too-big house; and an over-long commuting time, from house to job, and vice versa, because the required plot of land was unavailable near a city. Furthermore, over-sized houses facilitated other forms of conspicuous consumption, such as an over-sized garage for the family’s over-sized motor vehicles; buying more clothing to fill larger clothes closets; et cetera; hence, conspicuous consumption becomes a self-generating cycle of spending money for the sake of social prestige. Analogous to the consumer trend for over-sized houses is the trend towards buying over-sized light-trucks, specifically the off-road sport-utility vehicle type (cf. station wagon and estate car), as a form of psychologically comforting conspicuous consumption, because such big motor-vehicles usually are consumed by people who work in a city, but live and reside in an over-sized house in a suburban community.

• Prestige

In the Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice article “Status Consumption in Consumer Behaviour: Scale Development and Validation” (1999), J.K. Eastman et al. said that status consumption is based upon conspicuous consumption (among other contributions); yet, because there exist overlapping definitions, the literature does not establish definitive denotations for the terms “status consumption” and “conspicuous consumption”. Furthermore, in the Journal of Product & Brand Management article “Status Brands: Examining the Effects of Non-product-related Brand Associations on Status and Conspicuous Consumption” (2002), A. O’Cass and H. Frost reported that sociologists often have incorrectly and inaccurately used the terms “status consumption” and “conspicuous consumption” as interchangeable and equivalent terms. Moreover, in a later study, the authors found that, as sociologic constructs, the terms “status consumption” and “conspicuous consumption” denote different sociologic behaviours. Regarding the ambiguities of denotation and connotation of the term “conspicuous consumption”, in the European Journal of Marketing article “Conspicuous Consumption: A Literature Review” (1984), R. Mason reported that the classical, general theories of consumer decision-processes do not readily accommodate the construct of “conspicuous consumption”, because the nature of said socio-economic behaviours varies according to the social class and the economic group studied.

• Motivations

In the International Marketing Review article “Status Consumption in Cross-national Context: Socio–Psychological, Brand and Situational Antecedents” (2010), Paurav Shukla reported that, whilst researchers recognize the importance of the consumer’s social and psychological environment, the definition of the construct of status-directed consumption remains ambiguous, because, in order to develop a comprehensive general theory, social scientists are intellectually required to accept two fundamental assumptions that do not always concord. First, although the “rational” (economic) and the “irrational” (psychologic) elements of consumer decision-making often influence a person’s decision to buy particular goods and services, researchers and marketers usually have considered the rational element as the dominant factor affecting the person’s decision to buy the particular goods and services. Second, that the man or woman (consumer) has perceived the utility of the product (the goods, the services) as his or her prime consideration in evaluating its usefulness; the reason for buying the product. These assumptions, required for the development of a general theory of brand selection and brand purchase, are problematic, because the resultant theories tend either to misunderstand or to ignore the “irrational” element in the behaviour of the person-as-consumer; and because conspicuous consumption is a behaviour predominantly “psychological” in motivation and expression, Therefore, a comprehensive general theory would require a separate construct for the psychological elements of the socio-economic phenomenon that is conspicuous consumption.