The Self - Promotion Of Conspicuous Consumption And The Difference Of Self - Esteem

The motivation for conspicuous consumption is not to satisfy the practical needsin life but to pursue the symbols and signals as which luxuries are defined. Manyresearchers argue that by intentionally associating luxuries with social status andcareer success in advertisement, those merchants increase the sales volume. Then theone who consumes conspicuously more will feel more superior to others. Actually,the motivation for consumption in china is to pursue face for people with highersocial status will own more face，which shares the same mental process and contentwith self esteem. Nevertheless, social status the one own could never be increasedsubstantially by conspicuous consuming, which means conspicuous consumption is akind of self enhancement. Self enhancement is the inclination that people exaggerateshimself\herself and his or her ability, personal relationship and other traits irrationallyand positively. This positive self bias is widely identified in different culturalbackgrounds for its evolutional value and multicultural universality. In china one’sself enhancement is more implicit and tactical because of the typical collectivisticculture. Similar with face, self enhancement is also highly related to self esteem. Isnot only the motivation to self enhance driven by the need for self esteem, but alsopeople identifying themselves worse self enhance more，compared with others wholooks themselves better. So the motivation for conspicuous consumption is the needfor self-esteem mediated by face. Thus，people’s self enhancement for face andself-esteem through conspicuous consumption is discussed explicitly and implicitly inthis article that include a simple inventory research and two implicit research.In the inventory research, people’s explicit belief about self esteem andconspicuous is inquired with a small inventory. The conclusion is that the ones withhigh self esteem enhance themselves more than the others with low self esteem do.In the first and second research, the implicit association test is used to study theboth of self enhancement of conspicuous consumption for face, and the relationship between the face and self esteem. It’s concluded that all of the people are inclined toself enhance themselves by conspicuous consuming to satisfy the need for face andfor self esteem at last. And the ones with low self esteem self enhance more implicitlythrough conspicuous consumption than the others with high self esteem do.The consequences of these seems controversy to each other, for people reactdifferently under implicit and explicit circumstance. So, it’s concluded in this articlethat:1. The motivation for conspicuous consumption is the need for self esteem mediatedby awareness of face.2. People with low self esteem consume more conspicuously for self esteem andface than others with high self esteem do, but is less inclined to self enhanceexplicitly.