Consumer Identity: A Comprehensive Review and Integration of Contemporary Research

With over 1,700 articles on the topic in the past five years alone, consumer identity is established as a critical psychological driver of behavior in the marketplace. This chapter reviews all identity research in the top 20 marketing journals from 2017 to 2022 and integrates it into a single unifying framework: the Multiple-Identity Network. This integration answers several fundamental questions: What is consumer identity? What is the psychological structure of identity? How do consumers manage multiple identities within their self-concept (e.g., race, gender)? Key takeaways include the importance of brands and other marketplace actors in shaping stereotypes that define identities, psychological relationships between identities (e.g., dissimilarities), and balancing needs across multiple identities (e.g., status vs. belonging needs). Further topics include intersectionality, social hierarchy, stigma, marginalization, diversity marketing, target marketing, autonomy, self–brand connection, and online brand communities.