Mundane Consumption and the Self: A Social-Identity Perspective

The self—a sense of who and what we are—is suggested as an organizing construct through which people's everyday activities can be understood. Life's mundane tasks and the consumer behaviors necessary to enact them are cast in a perspective of self little used by consumer psychologists—social—identity theory. Two structural modeling studies in support of the perspective are reported. The results of the first one imply that people use products to enact one of their social identities and that products relate only indirectly to the overall or global self. The second study indicates that the frequency with which activities are performed depends on the salience of the identity they represent and that such salience, in turn, depends on several enabling factors. Taken together, the studies provide theoretical support for the common-sense notion that we are attracted to products that are consistent with, and that enable the enactment of, the various social identities which make up our sense of self; the more important an identity to us, the more attractive its associated products.