Collecting behavior & gender

1. Collecting behavior and its
connection to Line’s Digital Stamps
Adam Acar, PhD
Saeko Horita
Kobe City University of Foreign Studies

2. What is Collecting?
• Collecting behavior includes selecting,
acquiring, possessing, ordering, and possibly
completing. (Aristides (1988)
• Collected items become “sacred” by being
added other value such as experience or idea
(Belk et al., 1989)
•

3. What is Collecting?
• A specialized form of consumer behavior (Belk, et
al., 1991).
• Collecting is inherently acquisitive because its
primary focus is on gathering more of something
(Brown 1988).
• Rather than viewing shopping as a necessary or
even odious task to be minimized or avoided,
collectors commit to a constant and continual
shopping trip in pursuit of objects for the
collection.”

4. What is Collecting?
• MOTIVATIONS (Formanek, 1991)
– (1) Extension of the self (identity), collections helps
to build individuals’ world and identity.
– (2) Sociability refers to the collectors who
communicate with like-minded others through their
collections. They find items, relate to, and share with
those people.
– 3) preservation of history and creating a sense of
continuity
– (4) financial investment
– (5) addiction
•

5. Gender Differences
• Males tend to seek short-term relationships with
multiple partners who are physically attractive
and young to maximize the possibility of
successful reproduction.
• On the other hand, females tend to seek financial
prospects for themselves and their kids since they
have greater role imposed in reproduction and
parenting. Buss (1989)
• Male behavior in social media and male
purchases.

6. Gender Differences
• Females are better communicators.
• They must get support from other females to
raise kids: the more social the females are, the
more number of superior kids they are going
to raise. (Dunbar (2010))
• They are better at perception of emotions,
and at restriction of negative emotions: these
skills were necessary for child-rearing.
(Hampson et al (2006)) z

7. Gender Differences in Collecting
• Males tend to collect masculine items such as
sports-related items, automobiles or books.
• Female tend to collect feminine items such as
jewelry, animal replicas or house wares. (Belk,
1994)
• Males are more likely to go back to the habit of
collecting when they grow up. (Danet and Katriel
(1989))
• Collection have a role of a metaphor of capital: It
helps males to tell their power status to females
to attract. (Pearce (1994) )

8. Methodology
• An online survey was conducted among
randomly selected Japanese during the third
week of October, 2014 via
www.surveygizmo.com.
• A total of 89 people completed the
questionnaire.
• Among the subjects, 43(approximately 48.3
percent) were males and 46 (approximately
51.7 percent) were females.

9. Findings

10. Findings

11. Findings

12. Findings
• Respondents were asked if they are interested
in collecting
– faster than others
– superior items than others
– larger number of items than others.
• More than twice the number of males
answered yes to these questions compared to
females.

13. Findings
• Respondents were asked if they have told
their friends about their collections/if their
friends know about their collections.
• 78.1 % of females who have ever collected
items in the past had experiences on telling
their friends (This ratio was 46.7% for males)

14. Findings
• When asked what kinds of stickers the
subjects used,
– male subjects simply answered “funny”, “cute”,
“useful” and etc.
– Female subjects used expressions such as “stickers
that soften my attitude when I am mad”, “stickers
that would make my friends happy,” “the same
sticker that my friend has so that we can use
together” and etc.

15. Conclusions
• Females are known for being more social than
males and they tend to use collectibles to
communicate with others.
• It seems that some females consciously use
stickers as a tool to tighten/maintain their
relationships.
• Collecting Line stickers is similar to collecting
real life items.