타인지향 소비 가치의 의미와 동기

초록

Other-oriented consumption behavior rooted from the assumption that human is social beings is relatively much prevalent in Korean society with collectivistic cultural characteristics. Nonetheless, the majority of research in consumer behavior has been devoted to the realm of individual decision making which mainly deals with individuals’ motives and satisfaction rather than other-oriented behavior. In this vein, the current study aims to investigate how consumers perceive and think the other-oriented consumption values and what drives this typical behavior. The study inherently is a qualitative research employing depth-interviews to explore the phenomenon with insiders’ perspectives and to interpret it. The depth interviews were conducted with a total of sixteen informants who are evaluated to do often other-oriented consumption behavior. The findings show that the meaing of other-oriented consumption value is interpreted as ‘Myself Others See,’ a ‘spokesman,’ which is a tool of expressing his(her) identities. This typical consumer behavior is for obtaining ‘superiority’ and ‘difference.’ The other-oriented consumption behavior as a tool for sustaining two-sided ‘che-myun’ and social status is revealed to have strong relationships with self-satisfaction, which has been reported to be negatively related with the other-oriented value in the literature. Implications for following studies as well as practices are provided.

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