Consumer behavior is driven by the desire to understand who one is, what one believes and what one does. If consumers view themselves as “athletes”, they are likely to behave in ways that are consistent with what it means to “be” an athlete. These types of identity-driven behaviors have been observed across numerous identities, and an increasing interest in these effects has emerged in the academic marketing literature over the last two decades. The three goals of this paper are to show that identity often drives behavior, and that the processes underlying the influence of identity on behavior are often obscured by differences in the terminology.
Identity is defined as any category label to which a consumer self-associates that is amenable to a clear picture of what the person in the category looks like, thinks, feels and does. We hope that this definition will subsume various discipline-based approaches to identity-based behavior that originated in social psychology. A second objective of this article is to identify a series of important “identity principles” that connect the various streams of literature. The basic identity principles reviewed in this article are the foundations upon which researchers can build to further examine the theoretical underpinnings of Identity-based consumption.
The basic principles can also serve as points of departure for future research to achieve a better understanding of how an identity perspective can address important managerial and public-policy problems. We selected current trends that we deemed unprecedented in human history (at least in scale and pace) and that have wide-ranging implications for identity-based consumption as they relate to the five aforementioned identity principles. Every issue that is discussed to illustrate the way the identity principles can be applied relates either to globalization or to technological progress, especially in computer-mediated communication. These trends have important ramifications for identity research.
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