Analyzing consumers' attitude and behaviors toward brands through narcissism

Narcissism, as a term, is originated from a mythological story and described basically as highly positive or inflated self-concept. Research related to narcissism, which was first discussed scientifically by Freud in the early twentieth century, have increased through the influence of the cultural transformations, especially since the mid-twentieth century. Narcissism, as a personality trait, describes an individual who has high self-esteem and strong desire of power, is deprived of intimacy in bilateral relationships, pushes emotions into the background for the sake of powerful image, feels godly self-efficacy, has a negative opinion about others and cannot tolerate criticism. Besides, as this personality trait is widespread in western societies since the mid-20th century to the present, the culture is defined as narcissism culture/narcissistic. Some of the factors that interact with this culture can be listed as; the widespread of sexual exhibitionism, the expansion of materialist values depending on the capitalist economy, family relations have faded into the background, the excessive focus on child in parenting, the devaluation of senility and the ostracisation of the elders, the focus on competition in almost all areas of life, and the widespread of aggressive attitudes and behaviors. It is seen that each of these abovementioned factors have significant impacts on today's consumers' shopping experiences and preferences regarding products, services, and brands. In light of the previous studies examining the relationship between narcissism and consumption, with an inductive methodology, this study aims to analyze individuals' consumption behaviors and brand preferences. Also, it aims to address the gap in consumer behavior literature concerning the relationship between narcissism and consumption by examining the various aspects of this relationship holistically. A two-stage model of research was planned accordingly. In the first stage, Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI), which is commonly used in narcissism literature, was employed and participants who got the highest scores from the scale were invited to the second stage of the research. In the second step, in-depth interviews were conducted with these participants, and their consumption and brand preferences were questioned as the consumer purchase decision process: pre-purchase, during purchase and post-purchase. During the analysis phase, the grounded theory approach, which is commonly used in qualitative research, was used, and data were coded accordingly. Categories were created by bringing relevant codes together, and themes were created via aggregating relevant categories together. Findings are divided into four themes. The first one is being agentic, which refers to the narcissists' great individualistic attitudes in the purchase decision process. The second one is materialism, which implies narcissists' positive intentions to impulse buying and lavishness. The third one is Hatzfeld Syndrome, which consists of narcissists' intolerance of criticisms about their product preferences, seeing their possessions as distinctive, and low post-purchase regret. The last theme is 'Me>Brand' concept, which implies narcissists' low brand loyalty and high personalized promotion expectations from brands. In the last part of the analysis, narcissistic consumption term as a theoretical explanation is created and discussed as criticism towards consumption and together with commodity narcissism, which is suggested previously in the literature. In the conclusion part, some suggestions both for firms and social policymakers are made, and implementations for future research are mentioned.