ROLE OF FILIPINO CONSUMER CULTURE TO FILIPINO SELF AND IDENTITY

The consumer’s role in society is to keep the trade alive and well. When people buy
and sell goods, people get what they want and need while boosting the economy of the
country. This behavior can play an important role in promoting our identity as a people by
consuming locally made products instead of purchasing imported ones. This will
strengthen our economy by helping out Filipino owned businesses which will then hire
more employees and put more people to work. It isn’t wrong to buy imported products, we
all know that many of them are better than ours, that is something we have to accept, but
when it comes to certain items which we know are about the same quality as that of the
imports, we could probably patronize ours and save a bit of money while doing it.

With the change brought by innovation and economic progress to the world, people around
the globe have shifted their spending behaviors from functional to materialistic and
aesthetic purposes. Driven by this behavior, vanity became an area of study for numerous
researchers, made popular as a predictor of a person’s materialism (Chang et al., 2011).
Choosing vanity goods over spending for functionalism can be seen as problematic given
the economic status of the majority of Filipinos. The lack of information about the
consumer behavior of Filipinos, specifically about the matters of vanity and materialism,
influenced the realization of the paper. 200 Filipino individuals were surveyed for this
study which was mainly intended to find answers to following the hypotheses: 1)
Consumer vanity is positively related to anxiety. 2) Consumer vanity and materialism are
positively related. 3) Anxiety is positively related to materialism, 4) the relationship
between consumer vanity and materialism is mediated by anxiety, and 5) there is no
difference in consumer vanity and materialism between Filipino males and females.
Substantially, the results were found to be coherent with the hypotheses, showing evidence
of a significant relationship of vanity and anxiety with materialism independently, and
showing no significant differences among the genders with regards to materialism and
vanity. However, the data failed to show evidence that supports anxiety as a mediator
between vanity and materialism.