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Consumer Expenditures Observed on Social Media: Material Versus Experiential Purchases

Published: 15 December 2023 Publication History

Abstract

The visibility of consumer expenditure is a key concept in theories of consumer behavior. This study extends previous research from the offline context to the online space with the following research objectives: a) to rank a full range of expenditure categories by their frequencies of being observed on social media; b) to explain the mechanisms that underlay the observed frequencies of the expenditure categories with two predictors. One is the expenditure type, namely experiential versus material expenditures, and the other is the observers’ need for status. An online survey was conducted to rank a range of expenditure categories by their frequencies of being observed by people on their social media networks. Regression analysis was conducted to test the effects of the predictors. The results indicate that what is frequently observed online differs from what is easily observable offline. Observed frequencies are related to the nature of the expenditures. The more experiential a purchase is, the higher its observed frequency on social media. Moreover, people's need for status has differing impacts on the observed frequencies, depending on the nature of the expenditures. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first studies that examines a virtually entire basket of consumer expenditures as observed on social media. Another contribution of the study is the incorporation of predictors to explain the pattern of observed frequencies across expenditure categories and respondents, which has received scarce empirical investigation.

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  1. Consumer Expenditures Observed on Social Media: Material Versus Experiential Purchases

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    ICEME '23: Proceedings of the 2023 14th International Conference on E-business, Management and Economics
    July 2023
    507 pages
    ISBN:9798400708022
    DOI:10.1145/3616712
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Published: 15 December 2023

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    Author Tags

    1. expenditure visibility
    2. experiential purchases
    3. material purchases
    4. need for status
    5. social media

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