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Articles 1–7. Assistant Professor of Marketing, Goizueta Business School - Cited by 1,640 - identity - gift giving - luxury - conspicuous consumption.
Morgan Ward NDT is one of the world’s leading providers of non-destructive testing, inspection and advisory services to the aerospace, petrochemical, defense and general engineering industries.
Henry Morgan Ward (August 20, 1901 – June 26, 1963) was an American mathematician, a professor of mathematics at the California Institute of Technology.
- Abstract
- Signal Visibility and The Communication of Identity
- Meaning and Differentiation
- Cultural Capital and The Value of Subtle Signals
- Pilot Study: How Subtle Signals Affect Perception
- Study 1: Do Some Consumers Prefer Subtle Signals, and If So, Why?
- Study 2: The Role of Domain Relevance
- Study 3: The Role of Public Consumption
- General Discussion
Conspicuous consumption is one of the oldest ideas in consumer behavior. Since Veblen (1899), researchers have suggested that people choose products to communicate desired identities and characteristics (Belk 1988; Douglas and Isherwood 1978; Holt 1995, 1998; Solomon 1983). Brands assist the signaling process through visible logos and explicit patt...
Possessions and behaviors can act as signals of identity (Berger and Heath 2007, 2008; Douglas and Isherwood 1978; Goffman 1959; Holt 1998; Veblen 1899; Weber 1968/1978; Wernerfelt 1990), and this marking function has important implications for interpersonal interaction. Consumption is driven not only by function but also by symbolic value (Levy 19...
However, explicit signals also have downsides. Products and consumption behaviors more generally gain signal value based on the groups or types of people who engage in or consume them (Douglas and Isherwood 1978; McCracken 1988; Muniz and O’Guinn 2001). If many similar people wear the same brand or say the same phrase, it imbues that cultural item ...
We argue for the communication value of subtle signals. While subtle signals are likely harder for most people to recognize, they should be observable to insiders who have the necessary connoisseurship to decode their meaning. Cultural capital is described as the nonfinancial social assets, such as cultural knowledge, that people have in a particul...
Although our primary focus is to investigate when and why consumers prefer subtle signals, it was important to first examine how signal subtlety affects communication. Are subtle signals more likely to be misperceived, and if so, by whom? One case of signal misperception may occur with high-end goods. As the inverted U relationship between price an...
Even though subtle signals are less likely to facilitate desired recognition among most observers, study 1 examines whether some people might still prefer them. As in the pilot, we operationalized signal subtlety through the prominence of brand identification. To gain insight into the mechanism behind this effect, we also measured consumers’ desire...
Study 2 examines how insiders’ preference for subtle signals varies across different product domains. People tend to use certain domains (e.g., cars and clothes rather than bike lights and dish soaps) to express and infer identity (Belk 1981; Berger and Heath 2007; Shavitt 1990). Consequently, if insiders’ preference for subtle signals is driven by...
Study 3 had a number of goals. First, we investigate the role of public versus private consumption. Compared to private consumption, what people do in public is driven more by the goal to appeal to, or to communicate with, observers (Goffman 1959). People select more variety in public, for example, due to goals of impression management (Ratner and ...
Notions of conspicuous consumption pervade both academic theory and marketing practice. Researchers have examined how publicly visible consumption communicates social identities and marketers adorn their products with logos to enable the signaling process and fuel consumers’ desire to keep up with the Joneses. In contrast, building on notions of cu...
- Jonah A Berger, Morgan Ward
- 2010
5 days ago · Morgan Ward completed her PhD in Marketing at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business in 2010. Prior to joining the faculty at Emory in 2016, Ward held a faculty position at Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business. Ward’s primary research focus is consumer behavior. Her articles have been ...
A ground-breaking study by Goizueta Business School’s David Schweidel and Morgan Ward sheds new light on the real-world impact of digital enhancement, and what they find should be cause for significant concern.
mathematics of computation. volume 61,number 203. july 1993, pages 307-311. THE MATHEMATICAL WORK OF MORGAN WARD. D. H. LEHMER. The mathematical works of Morgan Ward fall into seven categories as follows: I Recurring Series II Diophantine Equations III Abstract Arithmetic. IV Lattice Theory.
