The aura of new goods: How consumers mediate newness

ABSTRACT This article investigates newness and how it informs consumer practices. Past consumer research has primarily explored a technical sense of newness with attention to attribute novelty and consumer intrinsic factors for novelty seeking behavior. These studies, however, have not fully captured the culturally ambiguous and shifting meanings of newness. To address this oversight, this article explores newness as a liminal phase in the social and material life of objects. Our analysis unpacks the experiential and identity value of newness, identifies a set of practices consumers engage in to mediate newness, and discusses different modalities of newness. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.