Consumer Expenditures Observed on Social Media: Material Versus Experiential Purchases

The visibility of consumer expenditure is a key concept in theories of consumer behavior. This study extends previous research from the offline context to the online space with the following research objectives: a) to rank a full range of expenditure categories by their frequencies of being observed on social media; b) to explain the mechanisms that underlay the observed frequencies of the expenditure categories with two predictors. One is the expenditure type, namely experiential versus material expenditures, and the other is the observers' need for status. An online survey was conducted to rank a range of expenditure categories by their frequencies of being observed by people on their social media networks. Regression analysis was conducted to test the effects of the predictors. The results indicate that what is frequently observed online differs from what is easily observable offline. Observed frequencies are related to the nature of the expenditures. The more experiential a purchase is, the higher its observed frequency on social media. Moreover, people's need for status has differing impacts on the observed frequencies, depending on the nature of the expenditures. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first studies that examines a virtually entire basket of consumer expenditures as observed on social media. Another contribution of the study is the incorporation of predictors to explain the pattern of observed frequencies across expenditure categories and respondents, which has received scarce empirical investigation.