Conspicuous Consumption: Displaying Wealth and Social Status

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Conspicous consumption
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Conspicuous consumption
Conspicuous consumption is the purchase of services and goods for one to show or as a
sign of displaying their wealth to the public. It simply is aimed at displaying ones social status in
a community especially when the services and goods displayed are very expensive for other
members of the public. This article on consumption type is mostly associated with the wealthy
and extremely members of the society but can also be associated with the economy or middle
class. Consumerism concept was stemmed out of the consumption theory. An example of
conspicuous consumption is that despite the market having very good and fast cars, the wealthy
prefer buying very fast cars like the Ferrari or larmbogini while a good Toyota can also work as
good as the mentioned ones (Bellezza, 2016). The rich also prefer buying and using their own
private jets.
Factors affecting buying behavior: marketing (the company's efforts are 4p) and social,
psychological, cultural and personal factors of consumer behavior.
Social factors influences
Social factors. Consumer buying behavior is also influenced by social factors, in
particular, consumer groups, family, social roles and statuses. Because these social factors can
significantly affect buying behavior, companies should consider this when creating marketing
strategies.
Psychologists receive information about subconscious desires, studying small groups of different
categories of consumers. This allows scientists to reveal the underlying motives that underlie the

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choice of these or other products. Researchers conducted unstructured, in-depth interviews and
applied the projection method to penetrate the depths of the subconscious - free associations,
completion of sentences, interpretation of drawings and role-playing games.
Researchers of motivation managed to make interesting and sometimes rather unexpected
conclusions about what associations cause this or that commodity in the human brain (Gilady,
2018). For example, as a result of one study, it turned out that consumers do not like buying
prunes, because its shriveled fruits are reminiscent of illnesses and old age. Despite such at
times, very unusual findings, the study of motivation is a proven method that allows marketers to
better understand the behavior of buyers.
Effects of consumption
Based on the above described characteristics of luxury goods, we can conclude that the
"status" of consumption of such goods. Indeed, the ability to purchase items related to the price
category "luxury" is a kind of way to identify your belonging to the "higher" society and
emphasize your status. Thus, for consumers, the purchase of luxury goods can be demonstrative
(Veblen, 2017). For the first time, the concept of demonstrative consumption was voiced in
Thorstein Veblen's Theory of an Idle Class: Economic Investigation of Institutions. "Veblen
defined this term as a feature of the behavior of the so-called" idle class ", establishing the latter
as the standard criteria for" social
He concluded that belonging to the idle class is achieved at a certain level of wealth or by
inheritance of higher social statuses in his conspicuous consumption article. Moreover, the
author concluded that the style of consumption of an idle class exerts a great influence on the
other classes. Thus, the middle and lower classes often seek to adopt the manner of consumption