The Fire of Desire: A Multisited Inquiry into Consumer Passion
Russell W. Belk, Güliz Ger, Søren Askegaard
Journal of Consumer Research · 2003 · Volume 30 · Issue 3
Abstract
Desire is the motivating force behind much of contemporary consumption. Yet consumer research has devoted little specific attention to passionate and fanciful consumer desire. This article is grounded in consumers' everyday experiences of longing for and fantasizing about particular goods. Based on journals, interviews, projective data, and inquiries into daily discourses in three cultures (the United States, Turkey, and Denmark), we develop a phenomenological account of desire. We find that desire is regarded as a powerful cyclic emotion that is both discomforting and pleasurable. Desire is an embodied passion involving a quest for otherness, sociality, danger, and inaccessibility. Underlying and driving the pursuit of desire, we find self-seduction, longing, desire for desire, fear of being without desire, hopefulness, and tensions between seduction and morality. We discuss theoretical implications of these processes for consumer research.
Keywords
Motivation/Desires/Goals, Phenomenology, Sociological Theories/Analysis, Depth/Long Interviews, Projective Techniques
Enable JavaScript for citation tools and additional paper interactions.