“Money Worlds” and Wellbeing: An Empirical Test of Tatzel's Model of Consumption

Introduction

In 2002 and 2003, Miriam Tatzel published a pair of papers that lay out a matrix for classifying consumers by their levels of materialism and their orientation towards spending money. Tatzel (2002, p. 105) found a contradiction in the literature in that “people who are loose with money are happier than people who are tight with money; that materialists are loose with money; and that on-materialists are happier than materialists.” She designed her theoretical classification system to resolve that contradiction by delineating four different “ideal types” of consumers, thereby explaining materialistic behavior in the marketplace. As of March 28, 2018, her two articles have been cited more than 300 times as reported by Google Scholar, indicating some interest in her proposals.

A number of researchers have used Tatzel’s ideas to examine the role of materialism in such areas as the importance of brand names in purchase decisions (Flynn, Goldsmith, & Pollitte, 2016; Liao & Wang, 2009; Ostrovskaya & Sarabia-Sánchez, 2013; Podoshen & Andrzejewski, 2012) and the relationship between well-being and materialism (Handa & Khare, 2013). These questions appear to be important aspects of any view of consumer culture; namely, how do predilections toward spending and desire for material goods interact to shape broad patterns of consumer behavior? In the end, however attractive a theory may appear, its ultimate value is dependent on its conceptual soundness; unfortunately, validity tests are few and far between. Only three studies report actual operationalizations and tests of Tatzel’s theoretical model (Pham, Yap, & Dowling, 2012; Tatzel, 2014; Troisi, Christopher, & Marek, 2006). None of these studies, however, have attempted to empirically confirm the four hypothesized consumer archetypes.

The present study builds on the three existing operationalizations, using a more rigorous methodology, in an attempt to provide a more definitive confirmation of Tatzel’s Materialism, Money Orientation matrix. The study uses established scales, cluster analysis, and a large sample of U.S. college students to see if the model, as predicted, differentiates types of consumers who vary in their materialistic and spending orientations. Consequently, the first objective of the study is to attempt to reproduce empirically the matrix proposed by Tatzel (2002), rather than just forming groups a priori as in earlier studies. This evidence could provide important additional support for the theoretical distinctions Tatzel proposes. The second objective is to compare the four groups of consumers comprising the matrix, using a set of criteria different from earlier studies, in order to determine if the four categories of consumers differ in the theoretically predicted ways. This evidence should further support the meaningfulness of the distinctions among the groups, thus providing a broader basis for better-targeted marketing efforts by emphasizing the distinctive marketplace behaviors of each group.