Overview of the Research:

A popular Spice Girls song a few years ago asked the listener to “Tell me what you want, what you really really want.” We asked consumers in the U.S., Turkey, and Denmark to do just that.

We were less interested in exactly what people wanted than in what it is like to passionately yearn for a particular consumer good and what it is like to get or not get the object of our desires. We were also interested in where these desires come from. Obviously marketing plays a role in stimulating our desires, but we also wanted to know how much of a role we ourselves play as consumers.

We interviewed consumers in depth, had them describe desire in various fanciful ways, and talked to them about how desire differed from concepts like wants and needs. We asked people to tell stories, draw pictures, make collages from magazine clippings, and use metaphors like “If desire was a color, it would be…” in order to learn more about what it is like to fervently wish for something.

In studying passionate consumer desires we focused on extraordinary longing for particular consumer goods, rather than the much more common conditions of merely being mildly attracted to something, having an idle wish, or unemotionally picking out a brand of an object that we may need, but don’t necessarily care about. In this sense we were not studying the vast majority of consumer purchases or potential future purchases. We were only concerned with that subset of our consumption that involves fervent, hot, extreme longing.

Examples of such objects varied a great deal between people and between cultures. For Americans and Danes, the objects of longing were often simpler places and times in natural settings – a cabin in the woods, a return to the seaside remembered from childhood. For Turks, however, the desired places were instead in glittering big cities of the world. It is not just that we want what we don’t have, but that we want what we see as being a better time, place, or thing than what we currently have. Besides places and activities other objects of consumer desire were as diverse as cars, toys, earrings, bicycles, pets, an aquarium, and a house or apartment. While luxury brands and chocolates appeared in all three cultures, trucks were specific to Americans

Significance of the Research
We found that rather than merely falling victim to marketing lures, passionate desires often are sought out by the consumer as well. As consumers we carefully scan special interest magazines, visit stores, and search the Internet in our quest for new things to want. Marketers may portray their products as being magical, but we often act as sorcerers’ apprentices in helping attach this magic to the product. Thus, rather than being seduced by marketers, we are apt to engage in self-seduction and eagerly seek new objects of desire.
Yet consumers also realize that attaining the object of desire may have dangerous or immoral consequences, framed as sin and guilt by Americans and as being out of control or unbalanced as seen by the Turks and Danes.

Most consumers believe that getting what we long for leads to happiness, satisfaction, and feelings of pleasure. Both Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw warned that getting what we wish for may be disappointing. We also find that obtaining what we desire is much less pleasurable than the excited state of desire itself.

We conclude that this is because we have a desire for desire itself. We regard desire as a state of hopeful anxiety. To passionately desire something may also give us hope through imagining fulfilling this longing. But when we realize our fondest desires, we often feel let down because we no longer experience the desire and hope that had occupied our imaginations. This helps account for why we find that consumers actively seek new things to desire. We cultivate the experience of new desires in order to once again feel the excited state of passionate desire.

We also find that while consumer desires are attached to specific consumer goods and services, the underlying benefit sought is not just the thing itself, but the respect, love, or admiration of other people. Two of the exercises we had people do were to imagine themselves swimming in a sea of desirable things and to tell a story about people pursuing an object of their desires. In both cases the descriptions were filled with other people. Whether these people were loved family members or just attractive others, the possession of the desired object was seen to bring interpersonal pleasures rather than simply personal pleasures.

Implications of the Research for Consumers
What are the implications of these findings for us as consumers? It is tempting to say that we may be better rewarded by nourishing consumer desires than by actually achieving them. But passionate longing is not likely to be sustained for very long when we regard the object as being unattainable. Another difficult to implement suggestion is that if longing for things is really longing for responses from other people who are important to us, we might cut out the consumption object and instead directly cultivate our relation with these people. That is, rather than long for having things, we might try more direct ways to cultivate better relations with others. We might stress doing and being rather than having.

References and Additional Sources of Information
Russell Belk, “Materialism and You,” Journal of Research for Consumers, 1 (1), 2001, http://www.jrconsumers.com.

Erich Fromm, To Have or To Be?, New York: Harper & Row, 1976.
Harold Kushner, When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough, New York: Summit Books,
1986.

Jacob Needleman, Money and the Meaning of Life, New York: Doubleday, 1991.
James Twitchell, Lead Us Into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism, New
York: Columbia University Press, 1999.