1. Identity salience: understanding when identity affects consumption

Brent Fikowski is an accountant, a former collegiate volleyball player, and was crowned the world’s second fittest man at the 2017 CrossFit Games: “A big part of my identity has been I’ve been this really good CrossFit athlete who’s also held a full-time job as an accountant for a private company. And I’ve been really proud of that” (Brent Fikowski). Shon Hopwood briefly served in the United States Navy, then turned to robbing banks and, after serving 11 years in federal prison, became Law Professor at Georgetown University: “It makes me laugh hearing you say it out loud because there are days where it doesn’t make sense to me, and I’ve lived it. That’s because the bank robber’s long dead and gone” (Shon Hopwood). Consumers are not unidimensional people. Like Brent Fikowski and Shon Hopwood, they have a sense of self that ebbs and flows, in large part because they have multiple identities that form and dissolve over time – even if their identities are less extreme than those held by Brent and Shon. Some consumers, like Brent, are proud of their multiple identities and embrace the richness of their complex self. Others, like Shon, desire to hide or forget particular identities and thus suppress aspects of their selfconcept. Yet, all consumers rely on those identities to make sense of who they are. How and when these different identities actively influence their consumption behaviour is a question central to identity-based marketing, and the focus of this chapter.