Consumer desire in three cultures: results from projective research

Abstract

Usingcollages, story-telling, sentence completion, word associations, and other projective techniques, we investigated the nature of consumer desire among students in the United States, Turkey, and Denmark. While we detected some cultural differences, gender differences were generally stronger and tended to be similar across the three cultures. Desire is primarily interpersonal, but it's interpersonal nature differs between men and women. For both men and women however, consumer desire is an intensely passionate positive emotional experience steeped in fantasies and dreams rather than an experience involving reasoned judgments. Desires are also dangerous, both because they are often transgressive and because they threaten a loss of control. We further found a cycle of desire in which, either because desire has been rationalized or realized, it is tamed and must be revitalized through developingnew foci.