The Impostor Syndrome from Luxury Consumption

Luxury brands symbolize cultural ideals and signal desirable qualities such as power, influence, and success, which embody individuals’ aspirations and vision of their ideal selves (Belk 1998). Projecting an ideal self by wearing luxury can yield a number of benefits such as economic rewards, special treatment, respect, and recognition from others (Lee, Ko and Megehee 2015). However, projecting an ideal self also highlights a discrepancy between consumers’ ideal and true selves, which may create psychological tension and dissonance (Erickson 1995; Clance and Imes 1978). Specifically, when individuals experience a mismatch between their external (i.e. projected) and internal (i.e. true) selves, they may feel inauthentic or like an impostor. Although self-authenticity is an important driver of individual behavior, which enhances physical and psychological wellbeing (Erickson 1995; Sheldon et al, 1997), prior marketing studies only examined consumers’ pursuit of authentic products and brands and overlooked their pursuit of an authentic self (Grayson and Martinec 2004; Napoli et al. 2014). The only study linking consumption behavior to self-authenticity reported that individuals may feel inauthentic from consuming counterfeit products (Gino, Norton and Ariely 2010), leaving the question open of how self-authenticity may be enhanced or undermined from consuming authentic products. Addressing this gap, we propose that although consuming luxury brands may garner external benefits (such as respect and recognition from others), it may also make consumers feel like an impostor because of the gap that it creates between consumers’ projected selves and true selves. We call this phenomenon the “impostor syndrome from luxury consumption” and predict that it will not emerge when consuming non-luxury brands that do not project consumers’ ideal selves. Furthermore, the impostor syndrome from luxury consumption should be more pronounced in individuals with low psychological entitlement, who perceive a large gap between their (deflated) view of their true self and the projected self, than in individuals with high entitlement, who perceive a small gap between their (inflated) view of their true self and the projected self. Finally, we explore the moderating effects of the detectability and malleability of the gap between consumers’ true and projected selves. Six studies test our predictions.