Self-Identity and Consumer Behavior Dissociative versus Associative Responses to Social Identity Threat: The Role of Consumer Self-Construal Self-Affirmation through the Choice of Highly Aesthetic Products It's Not Me, It's You: How Gift Giving Creates Giver Identity Threat as a Function of Social Closeness Identifiable but Not Identical: Combining Social Identity and Uniqueness Motives in Choice The Signature Effect: Signing Influences Consumption-Related Behavior by Priming Self-Identity An Interpretive Frame Model of Identity-Dependent Learning: The Moderating Role of Content-State Association

Abstract

Consumer researchers have recognized for a long time that people consume in ways that are consistent with their sense of self (Levy 1959; Sirgy 1982). Important thought leaders in our field have described and documented that consumers use possessions and brands to create their self-identities and communicate these selves to others and to themselves (e.g., Belk 1988; Fournier 1998; McCracken 1989). Although early research tended to focus on broad conceptual issues surrounding consumers and their sense of self, recent research takes a more granular approach, breaking down the relationship between identity concerns and consumption to look at the effects of specific self-related goals and of different aspects of self-identity on consumer behavior. For example, why would someone drive his Prius to work but drive his BMW to a blind date? Impression management? Value expression? Need for affiliation? The current collection of articles on self-identity and consumer behavior (appearing over the last two years) complements and adds to a growing body of work that has already appeared in JCR. Five of these six articles focus on specific relationships between self-identity-related goals and consumer behavior, exploring needs such as affiliation and distinctiveness, self-verification, and self-affirmation. The sixth paper explores the effect of identity activation on memory. The experiments in these articles fall into two paradigms. First, researchers threaten an aspect of self-identity to investigate how consumers engage in restorative behavior. In this paradigm, researchers may also allow consumers to bolster an aspect of self-identity to mitigate the need for self-repair. Second, researchers measure or manipulate (prime) a particular aspect of self-identity or a particular identity-related goal to examine the effect on subsequent consumer behavior. Taken altogether, the papers in this collection provide us with a more nuanced understanding of consumer behavior as it relates to self-identity. While this collection of recent articles moves us forward, the wide variety of self-identity goals and countless aspects of self-identity make this an extremely fruitful area for future research.