DISPLAYING OF CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Abstract

Conspicuous consumption is consuming or using of humans relatively luxury products/objects on the purpose of showing off the others, so they can gain status and prestige. Even if conspicuous consumption firstly conceptualized by Veblen, it is a consumption style that had been performed long before him. Today, this consumption style has been moved to the social media. Therefore, people can present the products that they consumed/used and activities that they performed to their friends or followers on some channels like Facebook and Instagram. And these people can make them jealous, thus they become extremely happy. At this juncture, the aim of this paper is to study the effect of conspicuous consumption on using social media. Because, the relationship between conspicuos consumption and social media has almost never studied in literatüre. So this is the main motivation factor of this paper. In this study first of all, the conceptual framework and a literature review related to conspicuous consumption was conducted. And then, in order to search the problem of showing off conspicuous consumption on social media, a survey was conducted with 397 social media users who live in Şanlıurfa. In the analysis of this study frequency analysis, t-test, one way ANOVA and multiple linear regression analysis were used. According to the research results, it’s seen that the users generally don’t show conspicuous consumption/leisure tendency on social media. However, in regard to the involvement of conspicuous consumption it was found that there are significant differences between demographic information categories. In addition, the result was reached that the people who use social media more intense are prone to make conspicuous sharing. Lastly, it was found that when users make conspicuous consumption on social media the most basic and strongest drives of them is firstly emulation and then respectively display and uniqueness