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The aim of this study is to deepen the understanding of luxury consumption by comparing the meanings and the attributes of counterfeit branded products and luxury goods.

This study is an interpretative qualitative research in which the meanings and essence of luxury and counterfeit goods are uncovered by written stories. The photo‐ethnographical method was used to generate the stories.

Consumers regard both luxury goods and counterfeits as being at different levels and of different quality ranging from poor to excellent. Counterfeits possess mainly social meanings, whereas authentic luxury goods may also operate on a personal level. However, consumers do not perceive luxury and counterfeit branded products as counterparts; counterfeits can be regarded as the embodiment of luxury, whereas non‐brand products are rather the opposite. Moreover, the existence of authenticity is perceived to be a vital connective and distinctive factor among luxury and counterfeit branded products.

The research aspires to shed light on the essence of counterfeit and luxury goods by comparing them in an effort to gain better understanding of the luxury phenomenon as a whole.

The purpose of this paper is to understand what Christmas gifts mean to children by examining the features and styles of the letters that children write to Santa Claus.

Contents and style of 314 authentic letters sent by UK children to Santa Claus were analyzed using an underlying interpretive consumer research approach.

Letters to Santa contain expressions of needs, wants, desires, hopes and dreams related to Christmas. The majority of letters were identified as expressions of wants and desires, while only a few letters contained features of needs or dreaming. This implies that for children Christmas seems to be a rather unspiritual festival concerning having things rather than dreams coming true.

The generalization of findings is limited to Western welfare societies. Letters are not originally written for research purposes, and therefore lack background information about the writers and their writing situations.

Analysis of letters to Santa offers an opportunity to identify the spirit of postmodern consumption with its contradictory aspects, and understand children as consumers. It is essential to recognize and understand the nature of the desires of today's children as they are an influential set of consumers.

The paper offers insights about the contemporary Christmas gift giving from the point of view of children. Contrary to previous studies, the central focus of the analysis is on gift request styles and letters as meaningful entities, not just on product categories or brands as such.

The purpose of this paper is to identify which consumption practices young adults regard as necessary. Recently, necessity consumption has not attracted the interest of consumer researchers, even though it serves as an important concept for studying the fundamentals of consumption.

The data are based on consumption diaries in which young adults reported their consumption practices during one week and then rated the degree to which they experienced each of these practices as a necessity or luxury on a seven‐point scale. The data collection was conducted in January 2011. The sample consisted of 55 Finnish university students and the total number of practices they reported in the diaries was 3,847. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics.

The results show that young adults experienced almost 60 per cent of their consumption practices as necessary. However, the boundaries between necessary consumption and luxury consumption appeared to be fluid. Accordingly, five groups of consumption practices were identified on the basis of their necessity/luxury ratings, and three of these groups included necessity practices of different levels.

The results show that young adults define necessity consumption differently in different situations. Also, the importance of social activities was evident in all three groups of necessity practices. To conclude, the authors suggest that the developed empirical model should be tested further in different contexts, especially regarding the situational factors, as it provides a fruitful starting point for studying necessity consumption.

This paper examines in what ways cultural representations of money reveal deprivation and empowerment in poverty.

The study draws on Finnish poor consumers’ narratives of their daily lives to identify the discursive practices involved in money talk. Poverty is seen as a frame in which the tacit cultural knowledge of money and the ways of enacting discursive practices are sustained and produced.

The research constructs a theoretical illustration of consumer empowerment and deprivation in poverty, which is based on four discursive practices: Moneyless is powerless, Capricious money, Wrestling with money, and Happiness cannot be bought with money. The illustration shows the dynamic evolution of empowerment and deprivation as they grow from and vary within the discursive practices.

The study highlights the practical carrying out of life in poverty, which does not emerge only as deprived or as empowered, but instead involves a tension between them.

This paper aims to show how social needs – the need for integration and need for distinctiveness – guide Finnish young adults’ mundane consumption behaviors.

The study draws on literature on the fundamental importance of social needs for people’s social well-being and the healthy development of the young. The research uses qualitative methods, leaning on an interpretive approach that regards social needs as subjectively experienced and socially constructed phenomena. The empirical data were sourced from 56 Finnish university students’ narratives on their daily consumption behaviors.

The findings present five categories: “Socializing through consumption”, “Consuming to affiliate”, “Uniqueness through consumption”, “Consuming to show off” and “Obedient consumption”, which are further linked to social needs.

The study opens up the ways social needs are connected to consumption behaviors, for example showing how quotidian consumption objects, such as branded clothes, may be used to satisfy social needs in a way that enables young adults to make independent and distinctive consumption choices. On the other hand, in regard to young consumers’ psychological and social well-being, the study finds that striving to satisfy social needs could also lead to destructive behaviors, such as alcohol consumption.

The current research highlights the unavoidable importance of social needs in young adults’ mundane consumption and how they strive to satisfy them. Thereby, it yields implications for social well-being by shedding light on the pressures and possibilities faced by young adults in their everyday life.