“As if It Were Mine”: Imagery Works by Inducing Psychological Ownership

By Bernadette Kamleitner, Silvia Feuchtl. Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice, 2015

97 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Imagery appeals are a powerful instrument in a communicator’s toolbox. Imagery allows evaluating an object prior to actual experience and simulating object ownership. This article investigates whether imagery and psychological ownership are systematically interlinked, thus causing objects to become “mine” through imagery. Across 2 studies, featuring 3 objects, 3 different types of advertisements, and based on more than 800 participants, this article supports a conceptual model that suggests that an inherent link between imagery and psychological ownership drives a varied set of consumer responses. Implications for marketers aiming to capitalize on the effects of imagery processing are derived.

Subfields: Literature and Literary Theory, Marketing, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e9046faa13f05e721a116923ce1fa2dc35eef726

Citations in the corpus

• Individual Psychological Ownership: Concepts, Evidence, and Implications for Research in Marketing (2015, unknown): “In this issue, Kamleitner and Feuchtl (2015) take a first step in this direction by showing that there is an inherent link between imagery—the sensory simulation of experiences—and psychological ownership.”
• I’m Proud of It: Consumer Technology Appropriation and Psychological Ownership (2015, unknown): “…is still in its infancy (Jussila et al., 2015), it has recently sparked considerable research interest (Kamleitner and Erki, 2013; Kamleitner and Feuchtl, 2015; Weiss and Johar, 2013), in part because psychological ownership is a robust predictor of willingness to pay more for a product (Brasel…”