The Safety of Objects: Materialism, Existential Insecurity, and Brand Connection

Abstract

Over the past 2 decades, a large body of research has examined how materialism is formed and how this value influences well-being. Although these studies have substantially contributed to our understanding of materialism, they shed little light on this value's relationship to consumer behavior. Our research seeks to address this gap by examining the influence of materialism on self- and communal-brand connections. We ground our conceptualization in terror management theory and suggest that materialistic individuals form strong connections to their brands as a response to existential insecurity. We test this premise by conducting a national survey among 314 adults as well as an experiment among 125 college students. Our results provide broad support for our thesis and suggest that the fear of death encourages materialistic individuals to form strong connections with their brands. (c) 2008 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

Bidirectional Dynamics of Materialism and Loneliness: Not Just a Vicious Cycle

“…Likewise, people who recalled recent instances of being socially excluded felt more attached to their belongings for reasons of "reassurance and comfort" (Clark et al 2011;Keefer et al 2012). In a representative survey, tendencies to experience social insecurity were associated with higher levels of materialism (Rindfleisch, Burroughs, and Wong 2009). Young adults who came from broken rather than from intact families held stronger materialistic values (Rindfleisch et al 1997).…”

Does Death Make Us All Equal? Conformism and Status-Seeking Under Mortality Salience

“…In particular, we collect information about participants' level of materialism, sex and age, because females have been often identified to dislike competition and to be less materialistic (see Rindfleisch et al (2009), Croson and Gneezy (2009)), and sensitivity to the mortality salience may increase with age.…”

“…Social Insecurity). As long as insecure subjects have weaker defense against the fear of death (see Rindfleisch et al (2009)), the more insecure the subjects, the more likely the success of our priming strategy should be.…”

“…Finally, we needed to control for other possible cultural worldviews such as religion beliefs, which might have affected our priming strategy (Arndt et al (2004b), Rindfleisch et al (2009)). In particular, when subjects can rely on a greater number of cultural views, the priming strategy is likely to fail.…”

“…More specifically, we split our sample in two groups: below and above the mean level of an indicator of materialism (collected through the exit questionnaire, see also Rindfleisch et al (2009)). The distribution of this indicator is negatively skewed (i.e.…”