Evolution of consumption: A psychological ownership framework

Why does — and what occurs when — nothing looks like it’s MINE?

Technological improvements are quickly altering the consumption of products and providers. Consumption is evolving in trendy capitalist societies from a mannequin during which folks legally personal personal materials items to access-based fashions during which folks buy momentary rights to experiential items owned by and shared with others. For instance, many city customers have changed automotive possession with automotive and trip sharing providers. Bodily footage occupying frames, wallets, and albums have been changed with digital pictures that may be considered at any time and songs, books, motion pictures, or magazines might be pulled down from the cloud. Half the world inhabitants now buys, sells, generates, and consumes items and knowledge on-line by means of linked gadgets, producing huge portions of private knowledge about their consumption patterns and personal lives.

The researchers say that technological improvements akin to digitization, platform markets, and the exponential growth of the technology and assortment of private knowledge are driving an evolution in consumption alongside two main dimensions. The primary dimension is from a mannequin of authorized possession, the place customers buy and eat their very own personal items, to a mannequin of authorized entry, during which customers buy momentary entry rights to items and providers owned and utilized by others. The second dimension is from consuming stable materials items to liquid experiential items. The advantages of those consumption adjustments, from comfort to decrease financial value to larger sustainability to raised choice matching, makes authorized possession of many bodily personal items undesirable and pointless. However their commensurate discount in psychological possession — the sensation that a factor is “MINE” — could have profoundly unfavourable penalties for customers and corporations.

Morewedge explains that “Psychological possession just isn’t authorized possession, however is, in some ways, a invaluable asset for customers and corporations. It satisfies vital shopper motives and is value-enhancing. The sensation that a good is MINE enhances how a lot we like the great, strengthens our attachment to it, and will increase how a lot we expect it’s value.” Downstream penalties to corporations embody elevated shopper demand for items and providers supplied by the agency, willingness to pay for items, phrase of mouth, and loyalty.

The researchers suggest that the consumption adjustments underway can have three results on psychological possession — threaten it, trigger it to switch to different targets, and create new alternatives to protect it. Fractional possession fashions and the impermanence and intangibility of access-based experiential items stunt the event of psychological possession for streamed, rented, and cloud-based items. In lots of circumstances, this leads to a lack of psychological possession, however typically it can switch to the manufacturers (e.g., Disney, Uber, MyChart) and gadgets by means of which items and providers are accessed (e.g., smartphones) or switch to the group of customers who use them (e.g., Fb teams, followers, and boards). The larger alternative and new channels for self-expression offered by this evolution of consumption, nevertheless, additionally provide new alternatives for customers to really feel as a lot psychological possession for these access-based experiential items and providers they eat as they might for privately owned materials items.

These consumption adjustments and their results on psychological possession seem in a framework that’s examined throughout three macro advertising and marketing developments: (1) the expansion of the sharing financial system; (2) the digitization of products and repair; and (three) the growth of private knowledge. Exemplary circumstances explored embody trip sharing, the digitization of music, and the growth of well being and wellness knowledge. Every case illustrates why every of those developments is eroding psychological possession, how it’s being remodeled, and new alternatives being created for corporations to recapture and protect it — whether or not in items and providers, middleman gadgets like a telephone, or on the model stage.

This psychological possession framework generates future analysis alternatives and actionable advertising and marketing methods for corporations searching for to protect the value-enhancing penalties of psychological possession and navigate circumstances the place it’s a legal responsibility. It highlights some ways during which psychological possession will proceed to be a invaluable lens by means of which to view, perceive, forecast, and handle the patron expertise.

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Materials offered by American Marketing Association. Unique written by Matt Weingarden. Observe: Content material could also be edited for type and size.