“Victimhood as a Currency: Observing Abusive Consumption Mobilizes Support for Misused Objects and Brands”
by Evrim de Groot
Glion Institute
Place: MA-330
Abstract
Social media platforms increasingly feature bizarre and extreme consumption practices, where branded goods and various objects are conspicuously destroyed, wasted, or used in manners that deviate from their intended purpose. This paper conceptualizes this phenomenon as abusive consumption and delineates it from related constructs in existing literature through a qualitative study. Subsequently, five experiments examine the effects that abusive consumption has on observers. Results show that observers of abusive consumption perceive it as harm inflicted on a morally worthy entity, eliciting moral anger. This moral anger, in turn, leads consumers to engage in compensatory acts for the object/brand being misused, such as using supportive hashtags or expressing increased purchase intention for the object/brand being misused by the actor. These effects attenuate when the object/brand is perceived as less worthy of protection or as complicit in the abusive act (e.g., a brand sponsoring a video in which its product is destroyed). This research is the first to conceptualize abusive consumption and to provide evidence for its downstream effects on brands, with important implications for marketing management
Bio
Evrim de Groot is an Assistant Professor of Luxury Business Management at the Glion Institute of Higher Education. She holds a PhD in Management from HEC Lausanne, where she delivered guest lectures in luxury marketing and worked as a doctoral researcher in the Department of Marketing before joining Glion. She received her bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Bilkent University and her master’s degree in Psychology from Lund University. Her research examines emerging forms of luxury and alternative status signals, particularly how luxury evolves in response to socio-economic change. Her work has been supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the HEC Lausanne Research Fund. At Glion, she teaches in the Specialization in Luxury Brand Strategy.
