Living Forever Inked? Tattoo Consumption and Materialism. Evidence from Italian Tattoo Conventions

In the last twenty years, tattooing has gained in increasing social relevance. From a socially condemned practice, signaling social marginalization, rebellion, or deviance, tattooing has gained a completely new social status, driven by factors such as the increasing interest of well-known personalities, such as celebrities (Goulding et al, 2004), and, more in general, to cultural and fashion changes. This massive change (Pentina & Spears, 2011), has made tattoos one of the most diffused forms of body modification over the world. This exponential growth has actually created a real business phenomenon, with a sector increasingly shaping itself as an industry, worth $ 722 million (IBISWorld, 2015). The increasing relevance of this phenomenon in business and consumer terms has increasingly attracted the attention of consumer and marketing research (e.g., Watson, 1998; Sierra et al, 2013). This work sheds some light on the actual impacts, on this consumption behavior, of materialistic tendencies of consumers. Materialism is in this case considered as a proxy of the consumer tendency to follow mainstream messages and tendencies, such as mass media messages or popular social models. Results provide some insights on the actual effects of such contemporary, socio-cultural ironic fad (Kosut, 2006) of tattoo consumption.