Ownership: A Perennial Prize or a Fading Goal? A Curation, Framework, and Agenda for Future Research

Abstract

Ownership has long been considered the focal action for marketers, as captured in the definition of consumer behavior as the “acquisition, consumption and disposal of time and offerings” (Morrin and Jacoby 2015). For consumer behavior researchers, the centrality of ownership has proven both theoretically and practically fortuitous. Ownership has been shown to offer numerous benefits (e.g., a sense of control, personal identification, risk reduction) and trigger a multitude of marketing-relevant effects (e.g., the endowment effect, incorporation into the extended self, different disposal tendencies). Today’s marketplace, however, provides an abundance of examples suggesting that the desire to consume and the desire to own may be orthogonal. For example, social media visibility and workplace “casualization” have created pressure for completely non-duplicative wardrobes (Boniface 2019), giving rise to clothing and accessory rental services (e.g., Rent the Runway Unlimited, Le Tote, My List at Bloomingdales), which cater to individuals who want to appear well-dressed yet no longer view product ownership as a worthwhile investment (Weliver 2019). Indeed, “fast fashion” may reflect this phenomenon more broadly, as it provides affordable clothes that capture immediate trends that are intended to be quickly discarded (Thomas 2019).

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