Hurts So Good: Status Products That Incur Environmental Costs Are Preferred By Status Striving Consumers

We propose that for status-striving consumers, the environmental costs of production (i.e., the damage or destruction to an environmental resource in order to produce a product) make status products more, rather than less, appealing. We argue that these environmental costs symbolically express consumers’ dominance and consequently represent elevated social status.

Citation:

Morgan K Ward, Sara Loughran Dommer, and Darren Dahl (2020) ,"Hurts So Good: Status Products That Incur Environmental Costs Are Preferred By Status Striving Consumers", in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 48, eds. Jennifer Argo, Tina M. Lowrey, and Hope Jensen Schau, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 1006-1010.