Can Consumers Form Emotional Bonds With Objects? ASU Professor Says Yes

Published: Friday, November 27, 2020 - 11:04am

It’s no secret some people buy things in hopes of feeling better about themselves, but less clear is whether people can form emotional bonds to objects similar to bonds with people. 

With the help of Arizona State University colleagues, marketing professor Naomi Mandel reviewed existing research about how consumers cope with something called "self-discrepancy."

“It's the difference between your actual self and your ideal self or the difference between where you are and where you want to be,” she said.

During the pandemic many people want to be with loved ones — and can’t. Mandel said consumers who feel socially isolated often buy nostalgic items. 

“Because those products provide a sense of continuity and remind them of  the good old days when they felt included with their family and friends,” she said.

It’s an example of what Mandel calls ‘compensatory consumption’, consuming something as a way to cope with self-discrepancy.

“If you feel threatened socially maybe you’ll buy a self-help book to try to, you know, repair your relationships,” she said. “Or you could do something symbolic, so maybe you could buy  a product that’s very trendy and popular right now to feel more accepted, more included. Or you could do something that’s more fluid, so you could buy exercise equipment and work out at home as a way of bolstering your fitness, you know so that kind of distracts you away from being threatened on the dimension of social connectedness.”

Mandel said the chances of bonding with objects depend on the reasons people buy them. And it can backfire. Rather than boosting your self-esteem, buying something you can’t afford can remind you that you’re not as wealthy as others.

Escapism is another example of compensatory consumption. Binge watching TV shows, reading, overeating and drinking are some common activities.

“There’s a huge potential to use this information and these strategies on social media and I think to some extent it’s happening already ... I don’t think they’re [marketers] using it to the extent that they might use these strategies,” Mandel said.

She and assistant marketing professor Monika Lisjack, with the help of graduate student Qin Wang, authored a paper titled “Compensatory Routes to Object Attachment” that was published in the journal Current Opinion in Psychology. They’re currently running a cross-cultural study on Facebook to examine differences among consumers in the United States, Asia and Latin America. 

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