How Conspicuous Consumption Affects Perceived Status

“Do me a favor on this matter,please.” Although this seems like a traditional English expression,the sentence has always been related to the Chinese face culture in China.Normally,once the words above heard,most obstacles would be overcome.Then,face,what exactly it is since it drives most Chinese people crazy? The perspective from social psychology holds that face in Chinese culture actually means the social status and prestige of a person.The higher the social status is,the more valuable the face of this person.As a result,he or she would be more likely to handle things with his or her face.Being like this,we can't help thinking how we can acquire our face since it's so useful.In marketing,it is proved that a kind of consuming behavior could improve one's social status and prestige,which is,conspicuous consumption.Upon its foundation,plenty of scholars from sociology,psychology and marketing have been devoted to exploring this concept.In return,many causes and reasons behind this consuming behavior were unveiled.However,what regretting is that few of those researches no matter abroad or in China explored how conspicuous consumption affects perceived status of consumers.To some extent,the answer of this question would let us know how we can acquire our useful face.This article,on the one hand,offers nouveau insights into conspicuous consumption by deeply investigating the perceivers who are in the social networks of consumers.On the other hand,this research contributes to the theoretical blank of how conspicuous consumption affects perceived status.Specifically,I divided the consumption effect factors of conspicuous consumption raised by the former sociological,psychological and marketing researchers into product characteristics and demographic variables two groups after carefully reviewed the relevant literatures.Then,I transformed the subject of those variables from consumers to perceivers to explore the reasons why conspicuous consumption could affect perceived status by the method of reference groups of different scenarios.For the research design,I complied with the latest designing method of social media scenario manipulation by current conspicuous consumption scholars.For data collection,I designed new survey items considering both the mature items of conspicuous consumption and perceived status which are few in existence as well as my research needs.Online survey was considered an appropriate way of obtaining data in this dissertation.For empirical study,SPSS26.0 software was adopted to do the analysis of variances of perceived status in different scenarios.What's more,regression analysis was also used to verify some of the liner relation between variables.Eventually,my research found that many characteristics of the product itself such as price and brand positioning would moderate the effect of conspicuous consumption's improvement on perceived status.So as the demographic variables of perceivers such as gender,age or so would lead to the same results.At the end of this dissertation,conclusions and relevant practical implications were explained in details along with the reflection of the limitations and restrictions of this study.