How Consumers Consume: A Typology of Consumption Practices

Abstract

This article examines what people do when they consume. In recent interpretive consumer research, three research streams have emerged, each portraying how people consume through a distinctive metaphor: consuming as experience, consuming as integration, and consuming as classification. The research reported here—a two-year observational case study of baseball spectators in Chicago's Wrigley Field bleachers—builds on this literature to systematically detail the universe of actions that constitute consuming. The resulting typology refines, extends, and synthesizes the three existing approaches to consuming and adds a fourth dimension—consuming as play—to yield a comprehensive vocabulary for describing how consumers consume. The usefulness of the typology is demonstrated by applying it to develop an alternative conception of materialism as a style of consuming.