Envy In Social Media

Envy is a universal emotion which is encountered when an individual wants something that another individual has (D'arms, 2009). It is an uncomfortable feeling that comes from the desire to covet for another individuals belonging. These desire have been penned by economists with names such as the bandwagon effect (Leibenstein, 1950) and “keeping-up-with-the-Joneses” (Frank 1999). These terms describes that consumers’ preferences is generally dependent on others possessions, reasons being unknown. A preference for products or services that others already possess is likely to have multiple determinants. The idea behind a phenomenon like keeping-up-with-the- Joneses is that people compare their situation to that of others, realize that they are

Studies on how Instagram effects our emotional states are limited. However recent studies have found that other social networking sites, namely Facebook are prone to provoke envious feelings. The attributes of Facebook that invoke envy is said to be photographs, likes and comments. According to researches more, photographs are the most prominent factor that drives envious feelings. Thus it is tempting to hypothesis those effect from the Facebook study due to the fact that many of the activities in Facebook; photographs, likes and comments are highly correlated with Instagram. Instagram is the built off app for photo viewing and became a social media phenomenon by allowing people to transform ordinary photos into magazine-shoot images with fancy filters and then share them with others, grew from 80 million users in 2013 to 150 million users worldwide in 2014. Apparently, the use of social networking tools have transformed in recent years. The commerce friendly platforms of social networking sites now facilitate for consumer-mediated purchasing, or also known as the social

In their 2011 paper "The Envy Premium in Product Evaluation," they find that benign envy leads people to pay a price premium for a product. They also find that malicious envy results in a person paying more for a product that is similar but different (i.e., same product category, but a different brand). Shalev and Morwitz use envy elicited by a person who is of a lower socioeconomic class to determine a person’s propensity to purchase an item to relieve envious feelings (2012). They find that a person will be more likely to purchase the product owned by this low status influencer in order to relieve their envious feelings.

The literature review also discusses and brings together the concepts of envy, social media (Instagram) and marketing to answer the main question of this research paper– What role does envy on products featured on Instagram play in purchase intentions of Instagram users. Participants of the survey are presented with a story scenario that elicits benign envy, control envy and no envy. A series of close ended questions are asked about their thoughts on the product, an Iphone 6s, and then a few open ended questions to give the maximum price they would pay for the item is