Towards a Theory of Socially Shared Consumption: Literature Review, Taxonomy, and Research Agenda

Recent years have seen an increased sharing of consumptive practices, experiences and evaluations on social media platforms. Such socially shared consumption can range from electronic word-of-mouth to formal online reviews as well as automated product mentions facilitated by social media applications Based on a review of extant emerging literature on this topic as well as of literature on relevant topics such as social influence, online reviews, theories of the extended self and conspicuous consumption, this paper proposes a new concept, “socially shared consumption” and a taxonomy for better understanding and analysing the growing phenomenon of consumers’ social sharing of consumption on social media platforms The taxonomy consists of five dimensions of socially shared consumption: Phase, Automation, Formality, Expressiveness, and Sentiment. The primary contributions of this research-in-progress paper are (a) description and definition of the new concept of socially shared consumption, (b) preliminary proposal of a taxonomy of socially shared consumption, and (c) outline of a research agenda to conduct theory-based empirical studies of socially shared consumption phenomena.