Consumer Culture Theory Book

Chapter 1: Identity Projects and the Marketplace

Hope Jensen Schau

The University of Arizona

IDENTITY PROJECTS AND THE MARKETPLACE

Overview
• Identity is complex, volitional and relational, consisting of four major constructs:
personality, self-concept, identity project, and self-presentation.
• Identity is constructed in the imagination.
• Imagination enables people to conceptualize realities of self, collectives and materiality.
• Identity projects are strategic configurations of objects, symbols, scripts and practices to
claim particular identity positions.
• Identity projects become manifest as context-driven self-presentations, or identity
performances within in social settings,
• Consumer imagination is when people use the marketplace and market-mediated objects,
symbols, scripts and practices to enact identity projects, or self-present.

Introduction
Identity is a complex phenomenon. It encompasses: 1) personality, the set of features that
comprise a given person’s character, which is thought to be relatively stable and scaffolded by
genetically determined traits, 2) self-concept, a collection of beliefs one has about one’s self, 3)
identity project, the strategic configuration of objects, symbols, scripts and practices to claim
particular identity position, and 4) self-presentation, the performance of an identity project within
a social context. In this chapter, personality is set aside as a broader identity construct; for now
we leave this to psychologists. Self-concept is addressed insofar as it illuminates identity
projects. Here, identity projects are focal, specifically highlighted is how identity projects are
enabled by the marketplace and are performed via self-presentation.

Consider how you act across different face-to-face social situations: holidays with family, out on
the town with friends, at the gym, engaging in sport (basketball, football, surfing), attending
classes, performing on stage (actors, magicians, dancers, musicians), on a job interview. Add to
that the ways in which you enact your identity across media: email, text, Skype, Instagram,
Pinterest, Reddit, Tinder, Snapchat, YouTube, FatWallet, fan forums, blogs. Some may
participate in team sports, hobby groups, fan communities, fantasy leagues, and/or cosplay
events. What elements of yourself stay constant and what elements changes? What different
goals are operating across these settings? What props (objects, symbols, scripts, practices) are
needed to perform these identity projects? How does the market support your identity
performance?

This chapter lays the foundations for examining consumption and its importance in people’s
lives. The focus, here, is on identity projects, where identity is recognized as volitional, that is, a
matter of choices, and that imagination is the process of forming identity. Of central importance
is how the market supports identity projects.
Roles, Perpetual Becoming and Self-Narrative
Identity is not accidental. Even the most seemingly casual or haphazard of identity performances
is volitional: created with intention and guided by purpose. Identity projects are complex sets of
behaviors and affiliations carried out daily and affected by social context. To move through this
complicated world, people have multiple identity projects in play that they juggle depending on
context and social role. A social role is a set of connected behaviors, rights, obligations, beliefs,
and norms people inhabit in a social situation. A given person holds multiple roles: son/daughter,
lover, friend, employee, co-worker, citizen, gamer, music fan, movie buff and athlete. Roles are
multiple, simultaneously or cyclically enacted. The social context determines which role is, or
roles are, dominant. In a given day, a person cycles through distinct social roles that require
subtle and even dramatic role-related shifts in their identity performances: from student to
employee, from athlete to gamer and from son/daughter to lover. Likewise, a person performs
more occasional identity work that might cross social roles and that is dependent on evolving
circumstances: comic relief, sage advisor, unwitting accomplice, bold hero, enthusiastic
storyteller, reluctant patient, frustrated commuter, impatient shopper, distracted diner, and even
elevator rider. At times, these social roles harmoniously connect and reinforce one another. At
other times, these roles collide, creating contradiction, conflict and chaos. People struggle to
define and redefine themselves amidst dynamic external forces (time, weather, economy,
politics, science, technology).

Just when one thinks they have “it” all figured out, circumstances shift, sometimes cosmically,
and one rebuilds their self on ever shifting ground. Identity is manifest as a continuous
orchestrated performance. Identity evolves over time, taking on new challenges and editing
scripts, or the series of behaviors, actions, and consequences that are expected in a particular
situation. People deftly weave together identity projects into relatively cohesive self-narratives:
their unique stories. The idea of identity as a project refers to the ongoing creation of narratives
of self identity relating to our perceptions of the past, present and hoped for future.

In contemporary consumer culture, people strategically construct their identities across time and
space in a constant state of becoming. Often identity projects are aided and even enabled by the
market, offering a set of props and practices that can be deployed separately or in combination to
self-present, or perform identity. For example, to be an athlete in training requires a combination
of activity appropriate clothes, shoes, food and drink, and equipment, as well as the performance
of calisthenics and strategic maneuvers using these props. Likewise, to be a student necessitates
access to educational texts, technology, and a virtual or physical campus, the use of backpacks or
messenger bags to organize and transport materials, and the performance of reading, analyzing,
writing, and discussing. These roles are made manifest through the marketplace where objects,
symbols, scripts and practices are on offer to support identity performance. Athlete and student
are social roles and identity projects that contribute to an identity and elements of grand self-
narratives, or ongoing. introspective recountings of personal development. In other words, social
roles drive identity projects and identity projects are supported by and performed with
marketplace offerings. Taken together, identity projects and self-presentation form self-
narratives and self-narratives organize identity projects and performances into relatively
cohesive, holistic identities. This perpetual recursive loop is what makes each person unique.
How does the loop begin? Philosophers posit that identity is constructed through the process of
imagination.
The Process of Imagination
Arguably, humans are distinct from many other living beings due to their ability to create and
communicate knowledge. Knowledge begins when beings understand themselves as distinct
from the world around them. People have the capacity to understand themselves and their
environment, and to transmit this understanding to one another. In essence, humans have
identities. Throughout history humans have struggled to understand themselves and their place in
the world. Their quest for self-discovery involved exhaustingly complex mental gymnastics. One
term repeatedly emerges: imagination.

Although the term imagination has many colloquial and academic connotations, it can be traced
to the ancient Greek philosopher Plato’s (424/423–348/347 BC) notion of phantasia as a
synthesis of sensory perception and rational thought resulting in knowledge (from his dialogue
entitled Theaetetus). Many centuries later, philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) asserted
imagination defines and shapes human experience (Kant 1956). This influenced Benedict
Anderson’s contemporary theory that our imagination became commodified via print capitalism,
enabling collectives beyond those that meet face-to-face to form (Anderson 1983). Print
capitalism refers to the consequences of Gutenberg’s printing press (invented 1440) that
permitted texts produced in a given language to be distributed widely within a language
community, thereby forming collectively shared ideas or common frames of reference. Consider
how media capitalism (television and streaming services) expands communities, as people
around the world access programming like reality television and become acquainted with
Keeping Up with the Kardashians. This program details the exploits of the Kardashian-Jenner
clan and their lifestyles of excess and trite melodrama. The Kardashian-Jenners, a once relatively
obscure American family cobbled together from a lawyer at the center of a celebrity murder trial,
a former Olympian, a fame-seeking matriarch and her photogenic offspring, becomes a global
symbol of wealth, social success and the American dream.

The concept of imagination yields two primary themes relevant to the study of consumption: 1)
imagination links corporeality (the body and physical sensations) and abstract reasoning
(thought) to yield knowledge (intelligence), and 2) imagination is central to the construction and
expression of identities and realities. While philosophers expend significant brainpower on the
first theme, we focus more on the second: the creation and performance of identity.

Plato introduces the term imagination to explain how sensory perception is combined with
interpretation, to create knowledge. In essence, Plato asserts that imagination enables people to
make sense of sensation. Put simply, Plato contends that imagination transforms sensation into
knowledge. From Plato’s perspective, the mind cannot apprehend sensory stimuli as they are
presented to the senses; the mind must attach meanings to the perceptions that can then be
ordered by rational thought into understanding (from his dialogues Philebus, 39b; Theaetetus,
195d, 193b). Therefore, all knowledge, truth itself, is filtered through imagination; nothing can
be humanly known that cannot first be imagined. Imagination is a central capacity: the
knowledge factory. This means that everything that comprises our intellect is the work of
imagination. We imagine art (paintings, sculpture, fiction, music, dance, etc.), science (biology,
chemistry, astronomy, mathematics etc.), and at times, the hair’s breadth difference between the
two.
The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322BC) builds on Plato, making a subtle
distinction between sensation and imagination. In sensing, the object itself is present to the
senses, while in imagination sensation is prolonged past the presence of the object (On Dreams,
459a). Sensation is the process of perceiving, and imagination is abstracted sensation. In other
words, sensation is what we do when confronted with a stimuli and imagination is where we
attach meaning to a stimulus so it can remain in our minds after the stimulus has disappeared.
These meanings become unmoored from the stimuli that inspired them expanding human
intellect far beyond bodily experience. Aristotle explains how we imagine what has never before
been sensed: scientific breakthroughs, like disease cures and novel art forms, like fantasy fiction.

In contrast to Plato and Aristotle, René Descartes (1596-1650) positions the imagination solely in
the bodily realm, and renders it inessential to the self (Descartes 1955). The imagination is
disassociated from the essential self (located in Cartesian terms in the abstract/intellectual realm)
because the abstraction created by the imagination originates within the physical realm (is tainted
by corporeality). In Meditation VI, Descartes definitively states, “imagination is nothing but a
certain application of the faculty of knowledge to the body which is immediately present to it”
(Descartes, 1955, p.233). Because the imagination is in Descartes’ terms completely reliant on,
and tainted by physical experience, imagination is not infinite; it is inextricably dependent upon
what the body has experienced. In short, Descartes argues that imagination is limited to what at
least once, we have sensed. We can only imagine permutations of what we have experienced
firsthand. This means that truly novel ideas can only arise if they are the compilation of
previously experienced phenomenon. Descartes might say that we imagined human aviation
from examining birds in flight and extrapolating to what we know about gravity and speed.
Descartes might explain a technology like Skype as the reconstitution of face-to-face interactions
with telephonic transmission and live videography – a novel pairing of experienced technologies.

The British philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) provides a hybrid understanding of

imagination. Hume concurs with Plato and Aristotle that imagination is the central intellectual
endeavor, however, the specifics of how the imagination works are omitted, or taken for granted,
and given a mystical or magical nature within the proverbial black box of the mindscape
(Treatise). Despite the supernatural quality of the imagination, Hume echoes Descartes that
imagination is grounded in sensation and limited. Hume states, “nothing we imagine is
absolutely impossible” (Hume, Treatise, I, ii, 2). Because the imagination 1) represents material
phenomena and 2) acts upon sensory representations, it cannot create inherently impossible
ideas. In other words, if we can imagine something, it is possible. For example, Hume might say
that color-changing clothing, like that made by Del Sol, is enabled by people who imagined
humans could become like chameleons changing colors according to environmental factors. To
make the seemingly impossible possible, human ingenuity introduced clothing that mimicked
chameleon’s chromatophores (the cells that change color), reacting to heat to modify the color
palate of the clothes.

Further, Hume brings a social component to imagination. We have all heard someone say that
they didn’t want to “re-invent the wheel”? Good news, they don’t have to! People can create
wheels, document the process, and pass the instructions to other people to build more wheels, or
to modify the designs and create specialized or enhanced wheels. But, how a did person identify
the need for a wheel and how did they envision the first wheel. Imagination is responsible for
closing the loop, or for creating strategies to communicate the abstractions in representational
tools to be included as sense data in subsequent perceptions, carrying meaning across people.
Hume asserts that reality is not a universal truth external to us, but rather a multiple, and layered
product of independent and communal understandings of the external world and social
relationships. Reality is a social construct built from shared individual physical experiences.
Hume contends that realities cannot be constructed without individual and shared conceptions of
materiality (understood as relationships between people and things that simultaneously constitute
human experience and give coherence to the world of objects) and social relations. In this way,
Hume refutes Plato’s claim that imagination leads to knowledge and truth that form stable
realities. For Hume, reality, based on truths, is historically and culturally variable and is socially
defined, that is to say, by convention. The anthropologist Daniel Miller has examined
consumption and people’s relationships with market-mediated objects extensively (Miller 1987;
1998; 2008; 2012) exploring how meanings are socially and historically constituted and how
important these meanings are in creating and signaling identity via ownership, proximity and
association. Miller asserts that the relationship between people and consumption is meaningful
and identity-centered. People consume to establish who they are and where they fit in the social
world.

Kant builds on Hume, refining the explanation of the process of imagination and elaborating on
its social component. Kant distills imagination into two primary forms: 1) reproductive (pre-
experiential intuition summoned spontaneously), and 2) productive (the location of knowledge
construction) where syntheses take place and understanding results (Kant 1965). Hence,
imagination is dependent upon sensible objects (both tangible like a physical brand and
intangible like a service or on-line game), the intellect, and their interrelationship. For Kant,
understanding and imagination are not independent forces; rather they are interdependent and
together produce realities that can be empirically experienced. Thus, imagination is only limited
by each person’s interpretation of experience, their individual mental faculties and the socio-
cultural system in which the experience and the individual are embedded. Put simply, Kant
agrees with Hume that a person’s imagination is constrained by their social network, their
culture. Communicating knowledge is an imaginative endeavor. To take a simple illustration, in
the Disney film, The Little Mermaid, Ariel, aided by Scuttle, believes the fork at Prince Eric’s
table setting is a hair comb and identifies it by the name dinglehopper. In this way, the audience
understands that the meaning of the fork is not shared by those that live under the sea, and is
reconstituted in both name and function.

Political scientist Benedict Anderson (1983) identifies imagination as an integral component of

community formation, specifically nations as a social category: “All communities larger than
primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined” (Anderson
1983, p. 6). He is the first theorist to directly apply imagination to consumption by depicting the
inaugural commodification of imagination through the rise of print capitalism and its impact on
identity and social relations (Anderson 1983). In Anderson’s account, the emergence of print
technology allowing large-scale dissemination of written material fostered a sense of national
community not previously experienced. Print capitalism gave national citizens consumable tools
to imagine and build shared experience. Through reading, people became united in language
communities roughly overlapping with geographic boundaries. For Anderson, ideas, images and
ideologies became the building blocks of imagined identities. Anderson’s notion of imagination
is premised on the act of consuming (buying and deciphering written texts) which led to new
identity configurations, new industries, new markets, and new social realities (Anderson 1983).
As noted above, Anderson’s notion of print capitalism can be updated to include global media
and the proliferation of programming like Keeping Up with the Kardashians or alternatively,
brands like Harry Potter and The Game of Thrones. These commercial platforms span media
(print, film, Internet streaming) to form common vocabularies for understanding worlds beyond
what any person has physically experienced. Likewise, the advent of the internet gave rise to
global imagined communities centering on commercial brands (Muniz and O’Guinn 2001;
Muniz and Schau 2005; Schau Muniz and Arnould 2009). In these brand-based collectives,
brand enthusiasts collaborate to create value by enhancing brand-oriented experiences through
creating and performing practices related to the brand and to the collective brand-related
engagement. In this way, The Game of Thrones becomes more valuable via collective practices
of engaging in fan theories regarding the trajectory of characters or cosplay events where fans
dress as favored Game of Thrones’ characters. Similarly, through global communications, the
experience of Mini Cooper is enhanced via collaborative use rituals like Mini Drives and shared
consumer customization practices, and LEGO brand experience is enhances through fan
collaboration to construct block representations of iconic architectures (Tower of Pisa),
adventure scenes (Indiana Jones), science fiction character’s (Star Wars’ R2D2) and fantasy era
environments (LEGO Castle).
Developing Anderson’s premise, anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1996) considers imagination
the manipulation of signs, symbols, commercial products, and their respective meanings to
visualize human potential and limitations. From Appadurai’s perspective, imagination is a
mundane practice and an inherently social process, belonging to all people. Consider seasonal
holiday displays. People around the world delight in the vicarious consumption of others
displays of holiday themed decorations. The delight stems from shared imagination about what
the particular holiday means.

Appadurai is concerned with imagination as the way in which ordinary people derive meaning
and create identity and community. Appadurai finds, “imagination has become a collective social
fact…the quotidian mental work of ordinary people” (Appadurai 1996, p. 5). Further, “ordinary
people have begun to deploy their imaginations in the practice of their everyday lives”
(Appadurai 1996, p. 5). In this way, imagination is not only the realm of impassioned scientists,
gifted artists or even hyper-enthusiastic fans, but rather imagination is how all people envision
their identity projects and devise ways to enact them. Through omnipresent social media, people
routinely assert their association with market-based offerings via symbolic appropriation,
visually representing branded symbols and market-oriented phenomena to perform identity
projects, becoming what they post (Schau and Gilly 2003). Thus, for example, on Instagram
people document their consumption journeys posting pictures of themselves at performances of
the Broadway play Hamilton or of the Blue Apron subscription meals they constructed. Similarly
on Sheng Li, Chinese tourists snap photos of their every experience in Finnish Lapland, from
reindeer sledging to Santa Claus village, Rovaniemi.
To recap our quick tour of imagination theories, experience, both individual and collective, is
understood, or made knowable, through the work of imagination. The imagination is composed
of abstractions and conceptual frameworks, which evolve into knowledge and understanding.
This evolution occurs when the frameworks are consistently able to sustain relationships among
stimuli. Knowledge and understanding based on these coherent conceptual frameworks become
larger intellectual projects known as identity and reality. Imagination is influenced and shaped by
social networks and ultimately culture. Social possibilities (orders, communities, social
infrastructures) are products of the imagination infused with conventions used to maintain and
perpetuate individual and shared notions of space, objects, self, and other. Imagination is where
the notions of self, community, and materialism develop and are maintained. People define
themselves in terms of their relationship to things, other people, and existing social groups. Often
people turn to the market for props to imagine and realize identity projects and construct lived
reality.

Agency and Self-Presentation

Above we learned that the concept of imagination crosses many disciplines (e.g., philosophy,
anthropology, political science, and cultural studies) and the meanings and conceptual nuances
are not stable among the disciplines and even contested within them. In other words, imagination
is complicated and scholars have not agreed on precisely what it is and how it works. Yet, there
is consensus that it underlies identity.

In general, philosophers seek to understand how people translate the stimuli their bodies are
exposed to into higher-level reasoning, and how higher-level reasoning inspires purposeful,
replicable behavior in order to assert their identity projects and communicate with one another.
Replicable behavior is socially enabled by the creation and dissemination of behavioral recipes
or action templates.

Action templates are blueprints for action, or codified, insight-driven, manifest manipulations of
patterned meaning for a specified purpose. They are formulas for replicable behaviors. For
example, how does a person realize they are hungry, locate a kitchen, concoct a set of edible
ingredients, perhaps add heat, decide it was an enjoyable and satisfying meal, document the
recipe and share it with others? In general, the question becomes: how do you turn cues from the
physical world (sensation) into meaning and derive insight patterns (knowledge) that can be
turned into action (behavior)? The answer may surprise you. You need imagination to know who
you are and how you relate to the world around you. You need identity projects with action
templates to guide your self-presentation. You need agency to achieve volition, or will.

Psychoanalysis is based on the psychology of will. Psychoanalytic theorists recognize humans as

agentic beings capable of exerting free will. They emphasize the voluntary nature of identity that
we experience within levels of consciousness and bring into being through introspection.
Beginning with the philosopher Schopenhauer (1788-1860) who finds human will to be mastery
of the intellect, identity is freed from the confines of bodily experience (Schopenhauer 1970) but
bound by states of intellectual awareness. For Schopenhauer, identity is more than lived
experience and people exert considerable thought toward identity. Similarly, philosopher
Frederic Nietzsche (1844-1900) recognizes will and intentionality in human identity, as freeing
human intellect from dependence on external divinity (dieties) (Nietzsche 1977, 1986).
Nietzsche posits that people are the masters of themselves and their destinies rather than acting
on the whims of gods.

Building upon Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud
(1946), introduces multiple levels of identity (the super ego, the ego and the id). These three
concepts account for the intentionality of will and simultaneously provide an explanation for
why people are not always aware of exercising their will (Freud 1962). Freud argues that the id is
governed by instinctive impulses. The superego is responsible for moral behavior and enforcing
norms. The ego imposes rationality on action, mediating between the super ego and the id. For
example, a student’s id might drive one to succeed on a test, even if that means cheating. The
student’s super ego asserts that cheating is outside the normal rules of the game and provides an
unfair advantage over other students. The student’s ego considers cheating on the test but decides
it is wrong and opts to take the test according to the rules the professor sets.

Freud argues that tension arises among the three levels of identity and that people temper their
free will, suppressing their instincts in the favor of social expectations. Together, Schopenhauer,
Nietzsche and Freud recognize people have free will but may not act on it because they fluidly
move across levels of awareness (consciousness) which focus on different elements of identity.
Through introspection or actively contemplating identity, one can recognize their free will, and
wield it via action templates. For example, someone may want to enact a superhero identity
project so they locate a cape pattern online, go to a fabric store to purchase raw materials, create
the cape from the selected cloth, couple the cape with a leotard and purchase a ticket to a
comicon event at which they will socially perform their superhero identity. Perhaps less
dramatically, one might imagine a runner’s identity project: purchase running shoes, running
appropriate attire, a belt to house their mobile phone and keys, as well as an easy to carry water
bottle to maintain hydration (Thomas, Price and Schau 2013).

The psychoanalysts describe introspection that leads to identity and is translated into action
templates but do not illuminate the social nature of these action templates. The sociological
tradition has yielded theories of identity that emphasize humans’ fundamentally social nature.
Sociologists see order in human behavior, which is based on causal incidents and motive
complexes (interwoven desires and goals. Social actors behave according to the operating
cultural logics of their society (Durkheim 1950). The process of people collectively using
effectively identical assumptions in interpreting each other’s actions may be termed cultural
logic (Enfield 2000). That is, we hypothesize as to one other’s motivations and intentions in our
use of objects, symbols and practices. Our individual behaviors, like each household offering up
a similar holiday display, when found in aggregate trends, become social facts (Durkheim 1950).
Thus, through consistent consumer display, we show and we know that we are the kind of people
who celebrate Halloween, the Day of the Dead, or the Midsommer festival. The individual
identity is akin to a cell level entity of a larger social organism. From the perspective of
Durkheimian sociology, while Americans may vary greatly in behavior, they share an underlying
belief in democracy and equality, where each person has the capacity to influence institutions
like government and rules like laws. In essence, psychoanalysts describe the introspective nature
of imagination and sociologists explicate the aggregation of individual imagination to form
social facts like belief in democracy and equality. In this way, members of a community
recognize the cape wearer at comicon as a superhero not a gothic aristocrat, and the person
struggling and sweating along on the side of the road as fitness buff rather than a person in
imminent danger fleeing a violent perpetrator.

Also utilizing a sociological lens, sociologist Erving Goffman (1922-1982) introduces theories of
self-presentation and social performance (Goffman 1959) to our understanding of identity and
creates an explicit link to consumption. The basic premise of Goffman's thesis is that self-
presentation is the intentional, tangible component of identity. Social actors engage in complex
intra-self negotiations to outwardly project a desired impression (Goffman 1959). Maintenance
of the desired impression comes from a cohesive set of complementary behaviors consistently
performed in order to sustain external perceptions (Schneider 1981; Schlenker 1975 and 1980).
Goffman terms this process impression management (Goffman 1959). Therefore, impression
management is embodied, or relies on what Marcel Mauss (1934/1973) terms body techniques to
communicate the desired self. The social actions requisite for self-presentation are consumption-
oriented because they are dependent upon individuals consuming signs, symbols, brands and
practices to communicate the desired impression (Williams and Bendelow 1998). The art of self-
presentation is at once the manipulation of meaningful signs (Willey 1994) and embodied
representation of self and experiencing as a self (Brewer 1998). Put simply, people consume to
perform their identities. The Red Hot Chili Peppers fan may signal their band allegiance by
wearing band t-shirts, create sharable playlists of recorded RHCP songs and emblazon a RHCP
sticker on their computer, skateboard or car. Perhaps more extreme a Harley-Davidson rider or
enthusiast may tattoo the brand on their neck (Schouten and McAlexander 1995).

Identity, Self-Presentation and Consumption

Consumption is central to the construction and expression of individual and collective identities.
Social theorists assert that consumption plays “a central role in the way the social world is
constructed” (Elliot 1997, p. 285). As McCracken (1988) states "the meaning of consumer goods
and the meaning creation accomplished by consumer processes are important parts of the
scaffolding of our present realities" (p. xi). Consumption as a productive, social, and
communicative endeavor. Consumers are social actors who (re)configure ideas, images, symbols,
and commercial products into meaningful identity projects: “it is in acquiring, using, and
exchanging things that individuals come to have social lives” (Lury 1996, p. 12). Anderson
(1997) emphatically asserts “consumption is now inseparable from identity” (p. 189). In essence,
consumers deliberately acquire things and engage in consumption practices to achieve a pre-
conceived notion of their essential self(ves). Every consumer, alone and/or in conjunction with
groups with whom we associate, aspires to locate the self(ves) within the socio-material world by
aligning their identity(ies) with certain objects and practices, while simultaneously distancing
their identity(ies) from others. Zaltman (1995) acknowledges imagination as the underlying
construct of meaning creation and knowledge, which Zaltman utilizes to justify the importance
of metaphor in consumption practices. As Fiske contends, “commodities are not just objects of
economic exchange; they are goods to think with, goods to speak with” (Fiske 1989, p. 31).
Thus, in contemporary consumer culture, through consumers representational and
communicative practices, material items are infused with meaning(s) that extend(s) far beyond
the producers’ intent (McCracken 1986).

The CCT (consumer culture theory) perspective adopts a socio-cultural notion of consumption
focusing on “the manner in which people convert things to ends of their own” (Strathern 1994, p.
X). Consumption is procuring, appreciating, and using things as utilitarian objects, signs, and
enablers of the identity projects. A considerable amount of scholarship in consumer research
examines the role of consumption in identity (Arnould and Wilk 1984; Belk 1988, 1992;
McCracken 1986, 1988). The central tenets of this work rest on the assumption that consumers
are what they consume, and conversely that consumers consume to communicate what they are;
Belk asserts, “this may be the most basic and powerful fact of consumer behavior” (Belk 1988,
p. 160). The relationship implicit in the above statement is that identity directly translates into
consumption, and that consumption is capable of revealing identity. Put simply, consumers
transform goods into possessions.

Following the CCT tradition, consumer identity projects are “social arrangement[s] in which
relations between lived culture and social resources, and between meaningful ways of life and
the symbolic and material resources on which they depend, are mediated through markets”
(Arnould and Thompson 2005, p. 869). A basic premise of this research is that “the marketplace
has become a preeminent source of mythic and symbolic resources through which people,
including those who lack resources to participate in the market as full-fledged consumers,
construct narratives of identity” (Arnould and Thompson 2005, p. 871). The following is a brief
review of some of the pioneering consumer researchers to have addressed the link between
identity and consumption at the individual and collective level.

Belk (1988) demonstrates that material items act as extensions of the self and communicate
personal and group level identity. Belk asserts that consumers seek to make tangible their
intangible beliefs and values through consumption:“[p]eople seek, express, confirm, and
ascertain a sense of being through what they have” (Belk 1988, p. 146). He shows that
possessions assist in self-perception and actually become, usually figuratively, or symbolically,
but less often literally, or physically, part of the consumer body (Belk 1988). Belk argues, “It
seems an inescapable fact of modern life that we learn, define, and remind ourselves of who we
are by our possessions” (Belk 1988, p. 160). Belk contends that possessions help to express
collective identities as well: “we exist not only as individuals, but also as collectivities. We often
define family, group, subculture, nation and human selves through various consumption objects”
(Belk 1988, p. 152).

Likewise, Belk asserts that consumers imagine themselves and their relationship to groups and
social institutions individually and in concert with other consumers through common symbols,
buildings and monuments. Further, artifacts associated with various group levels of identity
“provide a sense of community essential to group harmony, spirit, and cooperation” (Belk 1988,
p.160).

Similarly, Wallendorf and Arnould (1988) find favorite objects to be repositories of personal
meanings and symbols of experiences. Through interviews, informants were encouraged to share
object histories and to highlight object significance within their lives. Favorite possessions are
shown to be meaning containers, or material signs, through which abstract identities and social
ties are made concrete. Objects help situate possessors within the socio-material world through
affiliation and association. By examining materialism at the level of lived experience and
contextualizing object attachment, Wallendorf and Arnould (1988) demonstrate how possessions
are signifiers of identities and manifestations of self-expression.
O’Guinn and Belk (1989) describes a Christian fundamentalist theme park, where the attendees
see their consumption of the park experience as a pilgrimage and a tangible affirmation of their
commitment to their religious identity. Items acquired at the theme park (cosmetics, handbags,
statuettes) are accorded sacred status due to an imagined proximity to the consumers’ deity by
virtue of their availability in theme park stores.

Wallendorf and Arnould (1991) examine Thanksgiving consumption rituals and how consumers
imagine identity through the celebration of material surplus. Although they do not use the
concept of imagination, they demonstrate how consumers make sense of tradition and family
relationships through overt material excess and how this identity is reinvigorated through annual
ritual observation.

Belk (1992) discusses the meanings Mormon migrants ascribed to the possessions these internal
American migrants brought west to the Utah territory from their homes in the east, and how the
ascribed symbolism worked to imagine community and familial bonds in accordance with their
religious faith. During the Mormon migration, the uprooted believers gained strength from
sacrificing certain material things and used possessions to recreate their fractured identities and
form a new community in the “promised land”. Along the same thread, Mehta and Belk (1991)
discuss how Indian immigrants use objects to imagine affinity with India and to stand in for the
geographic locale of India. Totemic objects, emblems of their Indian origin, within migrants’
American households were designated signifiers of socio-cultural and physical India. In addition,
shrines representing emigrated family members were also placed in Indian homes. In both sets of
households physical proximity was imagined through material objects.

In Arnould and Price (1993), a river rafting expedition is said to yield magical experience. A
rock is transformed into a spiritual object with signification obtained through the rafting
adventure. In essence, it may be said the translation is the work of imagination. The rock as sense
data is given spiritual significance through a shared imagining. Furthermore, the rock grounds
the abstractions of the consumers, or makes tangible their belief structures and enables overt,
observable consumption and self-expression. Group members symbolically enact their affiliation
to each other and the experience by touching the rock.

Consumption collectives such as brand communities are tightly linked to identity (see chapter 4
for more discussion on this point). One such collective is a brand community defined as “a
specialized, non-geographically bound community, based on a structured set of social
relationships among admirers of a brand” (Muniz and O’Guinn 2001, p4). Brand communities
can be complex entities with their own cultures, rituals, traditions and codes of behavior. Muniz
and O’Guinn (2001) examine the brand communities centered on Ford Bronco trucks, Macintosh
computers and Saab automobiles and demonstrate that members of these communities derive an
important part of the brand consumption experience from membership in these communities.
Moreover, members appear to derive an aspect of personal identity from their membership and
participation in these communities. Schouten and McAlexander (1995) detail a set of consumers
and their relationships to Harley-Davidson motorcycles. They show that consumers enact
identity projects through the use of the motorcycles and the interaction among brand enthusiasts.
Conversely, consumers derive a sense of being from what they have and do not have. People
create identities from those things in their socio-material context: “goods are a means of making
visible and stable the basic categories by which we classify people in society” (Lury 1996, p.
13). Further, consumers may rely on the marketplace to establish oppositional brand associations
that signal identity projects were consumers self-present as not a Starbucks consumer (Kuo and
Hou 2017; Thompson and Arsel 2004).

These early efforts to link consumption and identity yield significant insights into consumption
motives and practices. Still, consumer identities often also consist of intentionally intangible
abstractions. We are sometimes what we choose not to have, as in voluntary consumption
abstinence. Sometimes our identities reflect a lack of resources. We cannot afford to consume
what would potentially make our identities tangible. Sometimes our identities reflect a denial.
We choose not to make tangible aspects of identity in order to hide their presence. Sometimes
our identities are not prone to tangible expression. We cannot locate strategies to express
complex facets of our identities. In other words, we may indeed be what we have self-presented,
but our identities exceed what is expressed through consumer goods either tangible (brands) or
intangible (experiences). Consumers selectively express aspects of identity and mute other
identity elements.

Consumer Imagination
Using the theories associated with imagination and a socio-cultural notion of consumption,
imagination is revealed as a fundamental construct in consumption. The market is a social
structure that scaffolds imagination and the performance of identity. In other words, the market
structurally supports consumer imagination and the self-presentation of identity projects. People
try to become the being they desire to be by consuming the items they imagine will help create
and sustain their ideas of themselves, their image, their identity (Bocock 1993, p. 68). That is to
say, consumers consume to make identities created in the imagination tangible, or put another
way, consumption is a manifestation of imagination. A concept of consumer imagination (Schau
2000) emerges as the transformation of goods, symbols and services into knowledge and
consumer identity projects. It is where consumers make sense of consumption objects and
practices. Consumers create identities within consumers’ imagination as they situate themselves
with respect to consumer goods, symbols, services and experiences. Consumer self-expression is
the manipulation of goods, symbols and services to communicate consumer identity projects
generated within the imagination. Since imagination is not instantly recognized as a manifest
behavior, consumer self-expression contains strategies for articulating the intangible consumer
identities. Consumer imagination is an individual and collective process, which through time
becomes a social fact, providing consumers with the realm of social and technical possibilities
that are the building blocks for lived, material reality.

Conclusion
In summary, identity is intentional. Imagination is the process translating sensation into meaning,
meaning into knowledge and knowledge into replicable purposive action. The market provides
fodder for consumers to enact imagined identify projects. The essence of imagination from a
consumer research perspective is that imagination is a creative production of the mind (along
side calculation, reason, and memory), where identities (self and communal, physical and
psychic) are constructed and later communicated. Consumer imagination as a useful construct is
the individual and communal process of combining socio-cultural tools (commercial products,
signs and symbols) to self-present identity projects.

Box 1: Critical Reflection: Creativity and Imagination

Philosophers have posited that humans are unique in their capacity to fathom and strategically
enact identity. Further, based on the writings of prominent philosophers, identity is a, and even
the cornerstone of knowledge. This chapter reveals imagination as the process that underlies
identity. Philosophers of experience argue about the limits of imagination, asserting that
imagination is the translation of sense data into meaning and meaning into knowledge.
Therefore, humans cannot imagine the impossible because it is beyond sensation. Our
imaginations are limited by what we have experienced. How does this notion of imagination
differ from imagination as the site of infinite creativity, a place where the improbable and even
the impossible can be envisioned? Think of narrative brands like Marvel comics that have a
stable of characters that exist outside the parameters of everyday experience possessing
capacities far beyond any human who has ever lived. Is this evidence of infinite imagination?
Conversely, science fiction often presents new realities (self-driving cars and live video
conferencing) that become reality. What do these premonitions reveal about imagination?

Box 2: Critical Reflection: Consumption and Life Transitions

At every stage of life, consumers imagine their identity. They use material, symbolic and
experiential resources to enact personal and collective identities. Consumption patterns facilitate
social differentiation (rings may signify marital status, a minivan might signal parenthood).
Changes in identity inspire new modes of consumption: adolescence, adulthood parenthood,
graduation, marriage, divorce, career switching, geographic relocation and drug rehabilitation.
How do people in adolescence, adulthood, and parenthood engage in self-presentation? What
consumption objects to they use, what consumption practices to they perform? How do people
who recently graduated, married, and divorced engage in self-presentation? What consumption
objects do they use, what consumption practices to they perform? How does switching careers,
relocating or rehabilitating from substance abuse impact consumption?

Box 3: Critical Reflection: We Are What We Consume

Identity is volitional, people act with intention toward a purpose. Through consumer
imagination, goods, symbols, experiences, and services are transformed into knowledge and
consumer identity projects. We are what we consume. The converse is also true: we are what we
do not consume. As such and to paraphrase Shakespeare, to consume or not to consume is a
choice. Consider ways in which people enact their identity by not consuming certain objects and
not engaging in specific practices. Make a list of your own choices to consume and not to
consume. What does this list reveal about your identity?

Box 4: Real World Scenario: Social Media

Technology influences consumer imagination. Within social media, consumers are able to create
and perform identity unimpeded by resources constraints. Often, just as in the physical world,
this is done through association with and use of brands, market-offerings and consumption
practices. Consider Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Snapchat. Consider the avatars adopted
in World of Warcraft. How do consumers present their identities, their selves in each of these
social media platforms? How do the features of the technology modify our identity projects?
How are brands and market offerings used in each of these platforms? Would we expect identity
to be imagined in these technology-mediated environments differently than in the physical
world? Why or why not?

Box 5: Real World Scenario: Video Games

People crave amusement. Play is an imaginative endeavor. Since consumption is the enactment
of identity, how does playing video games reflect identity projects? What identity projects do
video games support? Consider games that are anchored in the real world but perhaps not the real
world of a given consumer. For example, Call of Duty, a military-themed video game enables
consumers to experience combat situations that they may never have encountered in their lives.
How does playing Call of Duty support identity projects? Likewise, how does a game like Grand
Theft Auto, a game themed after criminal activity, support identity projects? Both of these
examples are anchored in real life, with human actors taking on relatively possible physical
circumstances. Turn now, to games that reflect less probable real life circumstances. Mario
Brothers’ games present actors in a relatively simplistic or stripped down set of life
circumstances. There is s discrete goal and it is repetitive. How does mastery of this game reflect
identity projects? Conversely, games like World of Warcraft and Assassins’ Creed are premised
on complex goals and anchored in environments that do not reflect consumers’ everyday lives.
How do these games support identity projects? How do these game based identities influence
consumers’ everyday identities? How do they influence your sense of self?

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