Social Status Concept

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, social status is defined as “the relative rank that an individual holds, with attendant rights, duties, and lifestyle, in a social hierarchy based upon honor or prestige. Status may be ascribed—that is, assigned to individuals at birth without reference to any innate abilities—or achieved, requiring special qualities and gained through competition and individual effort. Ascribed status is typically based on sex, age, race, family relationships, or birth, while achieved status may be based on education, occupation, marital status, accomplishments, or other factors”. Social status is one of the factors that influence the conspicuous consumption. As O’Cass and Frost (2002) refer in the Journal of Product

From the consumer’s perspective, status is the idea of displaying success and the notion of “having made it” in society (Langer, 1997). Human beings express themselves through consumption in many ways. Products and brands have the ability to communicate messages to others and formulate perceptions about how consumers who own specific brands are perceived by others. Conspicuous consumption is pursued in order to enhance one’s position in society, by signalizing wealth, public demonstration and affluence to other

Therefore, value is perceived as a subjective measurement of the usefulness or desired satisfaction that results from consumption. According to her, although what is received and what is given varies among consumers, value represents a tradeoff of the salient of “give” and “get” components. “The benefit components of value include salient intrinsic attributes, extrinsic attributes, perceived quality, and other relevant high level abstractions” (Zeithaml, 1988). Furthermore, value is defined as “whatever it is that the consumer seeks in making decisions as to which store to shop or which product to buy” (Chain Store Age, 1985). One more definition about value is given by Schelter (1984), supporting that value is all the factors, qualitative and quantitative, subjective and objective, that shape the complete shopping experience. In this definition, value includes all relevant choice criteria. The most common definition of value is the ration or tradeoff between quality and price, which a value-for-money conceptualization. These two components (quality and price) have different effects on perceived value for money. According to Zeithaml (1988) some customers perceive value when the price is low, whereas other people perceive value as a balance between quality and price. Therefore, the