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Evolution of key terms in marketing
Edited by Ben Wooliscroft
Introduction
The adoption of practices such as ostentatious display of goods and status consumption maintain a leading role in social relationships, with material or immaterial conspicuousness being conveyed via individual actions and behaviour. Conspicuous consumption, public display of goods or a desire for uniqueness and social membership via the possession of status symbols are diachronic and cross-cultural phenomena that define and characterise consumer behaviour ([125] Solomon, 1992; [90] Mason, 1998; [20] Chaudhuri and Manjumar, 2006). Leaving aside the universality and timelessness of status-motivated consumption and focusing on western developed societies, there seems little doubt that individuals' concern with self-image, fashion, and brand associations, strengthen and multiply the dynamics of consumer behaviour as a process which apart from satisfying basic needs also contributes to the establishment of social relations and the structure of social organisation.
The importance of interpersonal relations in defining consumer preferences and choices was a concern for economists including Adam Smith (1776/1999) who suggested that, to some degree, consumption contributes to the maintenance or improvement of social standing. Thorstein [147] Veblen (1899) is generally regarded as one of the first theorists to shed light on how the process of social comparison via the display of status symbols by members of the affluent and aristocratic leisure class operated. In his classic The Theory of the Leisure Class Veblen questioned the conventional neoclassical economic views of the time and produced one of the early theories of status-driven consumption. Veblen argues that consumer demand for services and goods derives from a need to establish social networks and a desire to emulate higher social classes and economic groups. He named this kind of universal and diachronic consumer behaviour "conspicuous consumption", an endless procedure that played a significant role in social mobility and economic development of the United States at the end of the 19th and beginning of the twentieth century. Although the importance of status-seeking consumption practices had been long recognised as one of the most fundamental forms of consumption, a fuller examination of the phenomenon in marketing and consumer behaviour literature becomes noticeable by its absence ([90] Mason, 1998). Here we argue that the lack of historical introspection regarding the intellectual antecedents of the discipline...