Materialism, Status Signaling, and Product Satisfaction Materialism, Status Signaling, and Product Satisfaction

The consumer satisfaction literature has not, for the most part, integrated individual values into the product evaluation process. Yet a comprehensive understanding of consumer satisfaction can best be attained by including both consumer and product factors. To demonstrate the usefulness of including individual values, this research focuses on one consumer value, namely, materialism. The authors empirically explore how this individual value is linked to consumers' evaluations of products they have purchased. Using surveys, the authors collected data from a sample of college students (n = 211) and a sample of adults (n = 270). Across these two studies, using divergent samples and products , they find consistent evidence that materialism is negatively related to product satisfaction in product categories with high potential for status signaling, but unrelated to product satisfaction in product categories with lower potential for status signaling. The consumption goals that produce these product evaluations are empirically addressed Consumer satisfaction, or the " consumer's fulfillment response " (Oliver 1997:13) is a central concept in consumer research and marketing practice. How and why consumers are satisfied or dissatisfied are intriguing questions in the marketing literature (e. different comparison standards (Spreng et al. 1996) or satisfaction paradigms (Fournier and Mick 1999) may coexist in explaining consumer satisfaction. Yet, little consumer satisfaction research has addressed both individual differences and product contexts (for an exception, see Fournier and Mick 1999). Comparison-standards research has not studied the basis of differing individual preferences for performance (Oliver and Desarbo 1988). Its predominant focus on attribute-level product performance in determining satisfaction precludes such understanding. To advance our knowledge of consumer satisfaction, there is a critical need to also include individual differences that affect how consumers evaluate products. The present research simultaneously includes both consumer and product factors. It goes beyond consumer satisfaction research that uses information-processing theory focused on the cognitive and affective procedures used in consumers' postpurchase evaluations. Information-processing studies of consumer satisfaction do not address consumer differences in personality, values, or social contexts. Instead, experimental participants are regarded as equivalent in their mechanisms for evaluating products postpurchase. A theoretical presupposition of such work is that consumers have attribute-focused expectations or desires prepurchase. While some research notes that satisfaction may not be solely the sum of attribute ratings (Fournier and Mick 1999), most research only includes such ratings. This may be a function of the ease of changing attribute levels in experimental manipulations and managerial …