Global Conference 2019

Socioeconomic status has been a fundamental concept that is used to explain or predict consumer behaviors. However, little is known regarding how individuals would consume when moving from one socioeconomic status to another. Five studies show that consumers in a mindset of downward mobility prefer products featured in advertisements that appeal to one’s cultural capital (e.g., knowledge, taste) to those appealing to one’s economic capital (e.g., money and assets); while consumers in a mindset of upward mobility prefer both equally. The authors trace this effect to consumers’ asymmetric conceptualizations of upward and downward social mobility, suggesting that downwardly mobile consumers anticipate to have “more cultural than economic capital” and thus dissociate themselves from products appealing to economic capital as a way to avoid post-purchase guilt. By implying how the same product can be framed by different advertising appeals to target consumers in different trajectories of social mobility, and how consumers in the same socioeconomic bracket may shop differently due to their anticipated shifts in social positions, this research departs from a static account of consumer segmentation to provide a new lens to examine consumer behaviors in the dynamic social configuration of inequality.