An Investigation of Consumer Motivation in Alternative Consumption and Impression Formation.

Consumer Motivation;Economics;Business;Business Administration

Witmer, Megan E.Wooten, David B. ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Consumer Motivation;    Economics;    Business;    Business Administration;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/102328/mewitmer_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

Consumer behavior researchers have long been interested in how an individual’s sense of motivation maps onto the individual’s consumptive acts.However, more work is needed to understand how specific types of motivation arise, how certain motivations take priority over others and how individuals differ in their perception of motivation. This dissertation contributes to this effort in two ways.First, through an ethnographic study, the research explores the ways in which consumption motivation occurs through evolving, interpretive processes among people.This ethnography examines an organization promoting consumption practices embodied by the local food movement. I investigate factors motivating consumers’ participation in the organization and the organization’s effectiveness in altering consumers’ orientation toward local food. Social movement framing literature provides a framework to analyze the organization’s novel approach to changing consumer motivation. I will argue that the environment fostered by the organization facilitates articulation and elaboration of its collective action frame, which emphasizes community in order to motivate alternative consumption.Second, using experimental methods, the research investigates how an individual’s value system shapes perception of consumption motivation.The research investigates individual differences in the association between purchases and inferred higher-level motivation (e.g. status). Recent work suggests a universally held belief equating material purchases to ulterior motives, resulting in the stigmatization of materialistic people (Van Boven, Gilovich and Campbell, 2010), but I will demonstrate a more nuanced process influenced by the observer’s adherence to materialism as a value (Richins and Dawson 1992).Together, these essays advance our understanding of consumption motivation as a social phenomenon while also contributing to a broader, interdisciplinary discourse concerning human motivation more generally.