What is materialism? Testing two dominant perspectives on materialism in the marketing literature

• Authors: Srikant Manchiraju , Zlatan Krizan
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Materialism is defined as the importance an individual attaches to worldly possessions, which has been considered as an important construct in consumer behavior and marketing literature. There are two dominant perspectives on individual materialism in the marketing literature that focus on (1) personality traits or (2) individual personal values. However, several scholars have questioned the aforementioned materialism conceptualizations. Therefore, the present study directly compares the constructs of personality materialism and value materialism. Structural equation modeling was employed to address the following issues: (1) what are the key conceptual dimensions of materialism, (2) how much do they overlap, and (3) what is their discriminant validity in predicting outcomes linked to materialism. We suggest these two dominant perspectives on individual materialism are two distinct constructs, as they shared only 21 percent of common variance. Furthermore, we stress the multi-faceted nature of materialism, with an emphasis on future research directions related to materialism in marketing.

Keywords

EN

materialism; individual perspective; personality trait; personal value; marketing; conceptualizations

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Management & Marketing
• Year: 2015
• Volume: 10
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 89-102

Dates

published

2015-09-01

online

2015-09-01

Contributors

author

Srikant Manchiraju

• Florida State University, Florida, United States of America

author

Zlatan Krizan

• Iowa State University, Iowa, United States of America

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Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/mmcks-2015-0008