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Introduction
Conspicuous consumption serves as an indicator of wealth and social status. A “Veblen effect” exists in that consumers are willing to pay more to get equivalent functional utility (Bagwell and Bernheim, 1996). Bourdieu (1977) has argued that conspicuous consumption is “symbolic capital” because it gives advantages by suggesting wealth, alliances and mating suitability rather like economic capital. Using “luxury” brands makes visible the wealth and social status to which one aspires. Luxury brands have images in the minds of consumers that comprise associations about high price, quality, superior aesthetics, rarity and extraordinariness. These associations are largely non-functional (Heine, 2012), with their price having a more powerful influence on conspicuous consumption than the fashionable element (Lewis and Moital, 2016). One hopes, therefore, that luxury signaling is a way to communicate one’s own innate superior quality.
The function of conspicuous consumption in human relationships has been a popular topic in prior research, which has often been grounded in evolutionary psychology. De Fraja (2009) has suggested that conspicuous consumption serves as a signal of a desirable mate. Specifically, a male’s value as a mate increases with his wealth, which can be signaled by conspicuous consumption. But women also engage in conspicuous consumption. They have a stronger preference for appearance-related consumption as a self-promotion tactic and to compete with rivals (Hudders et al., 2014). More specifically, evidence has been found that women use luxury brands to signal to other women that their romantic partners are devoted to them (Wang and Griskevicius, 2014). In doing so, women deter other women from poaching their mates, which thus maximizes their chances of successful reproduction and child bearing.
However, apart from females sending such signals to other females in a competitive context, males may also be (perhaps unintended) recipients of their signals. Previous research on luxury brand signals has not explored this possibility. Our current understanding of female conspicuous consumption is limited to female-vs-female competition, and its intended signals. There is a need to look at the signals female conspicuous consumption sends from a male perspective. How do males interpret the signals sent by a woman who is consuming luxury brands? In this research, inductive phenomenological methods were applied in an attempt to understand the lived experience of men seeing unknown...