Consumers with status attainment goals seek out services they perceive to offer social positioning benefits (or ‘positional’ value), which they then use to attain an advantageous position relative to others within a given status hierarchy. However, consumers’ ongoing engagement with the offerings of such ‘positional services’ (e.g. university education) is regulated by the emotion they experience when the status attainment goal is threatened (Higgins & Scholer 2009). During consumption, consumers recognise that their status attainment goals are threatened when they are outperformed by another consumer and experience envy as a result. Consumers’ experience of envy can be either benign (i.e. motivating) or malicious (i.e. negative), and these experiences can drive increased and decreased engagement respectively in a goods context (Belk 2011; Van de Ven et al. 2011), but how the different envy experiences drive consumer engagement outcomes in a services context is not well understood. As such, the research question driving this thesis is:
How does envy influence consumer engagement with positional services?
Description
Submitted in the fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, University of the Sunshine Coast, 2018.