LAUSR

In the book titled ‘The Theory of the Leisure Class’, Veblen (1899)first coined the term status consumption to indicate people's tendency to acquire consumer items to display social status. Marketers and retailers dealing with status items need to better understand factors driving status consumption to capitalise the opportunities arising for status items. One important factor that can possibly drive status consumption is consumers' view of the self or self-construal. Self-construal denotes how individuals interpret and assess the world (Wang and Wang, 2016).As such, self-construal stems from personal experiences and the socialisation process transmitted from generation to generation. Individuals' behaviour patterns and their interactions can vary depending on their self-construals. Self-construal has two types: independent and interdependent (Markus and Kitayama, 1991; Chen and Li, 2005; Thomas, 2008; Taras et al., 2010; Trumbull and Rothstein-Fisch, 2011). An independent construal emphasises individualism and separation from others, whereas an interdependent construal emphasises collectivism and connections with others (Kashima et al., 1995). As such, people with independent construal focus on individuality and uniqueness, while people with interdependent construal give importance to social obligations, social bonding, and relations (Kim and Markus, 1999).