Zen of the pack rat: Yard sales bring angst, exhilaration for sellers

Our possessions are more than inanimate objects; often they are fraught with meaning, negative or positive. Examining habits of disposition as well as acquisition can be a valuable psychological tool for marketing, according to a study undertaken by, a W. P. Carey School of Business researcher.

Marketing research surveys often employ painstakingly crafted questions in a mail or telephone study. Such surveys typically ask consumers to rate products or services on a 1-to-10 scale. In contrast, a marketing professor at the W. P. Carey School of Business used another way to understand consumers, providing fresh — and potentially lucrative — insights for marketers.

John Lastovicka started out more than 25 years ago being very statistical, very quantitative in his approach to consumer research. He has devised plenty of those structured questionnaires that elicit thousands of statistics. "But I've always wanted to do something purely qualitative," he said, "something that's inductive, where you go into the field with no preconceived ideas and learn from what you see people actually doing in their own homes and from what they say in their own words about their own lives."

This approach, called ethnography, has the researcher gathering information from an inside perspective — the researcher is "there," on-site, with a few consumers in their living environment, viewing firsthand what happens throughout their day. This is quite different from more traditional marketing survey, in which many consumers are "pulled out" of their normal routine to answer pre-determined questions with pre-determined answers.

Lastovicka's research topic spins off from a marketing concept that "we are what we own." Possessions are an integral part of consumers' identities; the "self" is reflected in material possessions. But if we are what we own, we are also what we disown, Lastovicka reasoned. To investigate his line of reasoning, Lastovicka bypassed the mailbox and phone calls and went to the garage — to garage sales, to be precise, focusing on just 11 sales of the 9 million held annually. Days and hours were spent at each sale, with the researchers participating in the sales by helping sellers set up shop, watch over items being sold, and keeping sellers company during their sale. Unstructured, in-depth interviews were conducted with sellers, their friends and relations.

Lastovicka and University of Auckland marketing lecturer Karen V. Fernandez also observed consumer-to-consumer online auctions. They could have examined thousands of auctions; there are $19 billion in such sales annually. Instead, they zeroed in on 43 people selling their own wedding dresses, asking each via e-mail to share the story of her gown in her own words.

Their zoom lens approach proved compelling — and revealing.

There have been very few studies of what marketing professors call "disposition behavior." The few that exist have focused on the "positive meanings" of possessions, and view disposition as "a painful process in which consumers experience the death of a piece of their lives with each possession lost," according to Lastovicka. But what about the negative meanings of possessions — the punch bowl viewed as pretentious by its proud-to-be working-class owners, or the wedding dress that became emblematic of failure when the marriage didn't work?

Some sellers appeared eager to be rid of remnants of the less desirable stages of their lives. Others subtly sabotaged the sale of possessions they secretly want to keep. "After people have lived with their possessions for a while, they become storied," positively or negatively," Lastovicka said. Selling one of these emotionally charged items at a garage sale or online can bring a slew of mixed feelings. How do people cope throughout the process?

The owners of the punch bowl laughed and took pleasure at disowning the bowl. Getting rid of a wedding dress from a failed marriage allowed the seller to put aside a mistake and move on to the new and better life she wished to have. "Disposition not just acquisition — can assist self-enhancement," Lastovicka concluded.

Some owners distance themselves from the possessions they're planning to part with, Lastovicka found. Preparing for a sale, they stockpile items in an out-of-the-way place in the house, allowing for a "trial disposition." (Lastovicka describes the place as a way station between "me" and "not me.") Some people make photographs or other keepsakes of sale items, so they can "have" their possession and get rid of it, too.

That way, "psychological detachment is not required for satisfactory physical detachment." Some try to erase or change the meanings of the possessions before disposing of them. People put a lot of effort into washing, ironing, folding, pinning, wrapping and pricing their clothes and bedclothes before selling such items - sometimes the cost of cleaning exceeds the sale price, Lastovicka found.

"Cleansing rituals may erase the owner's essence so as to avoid figuratively washing one's dirty linen in public," Lastovicka found. He describes cleaning as a "boundary-crossing ritual" performed as an "item moves from being a personal possession" to being "renewed as a marketplace commodity." In other words, to get rid of something, an owner may erase himself from the possession and substitute a "public" meaning, Lastovicka said.

Some people share private meanings, negative or positive, with buyers - whether for the healing effect of confession or to spread a little cheer. A couple leaving their farm for town sold a wedding present of rooster lamps at a garage sale in preparation for the move. The lamps reminded the wife of the hard life the couple had endured, and was in truth relieved to give up. "When Toni sold her lamps and also passed along deep feelings about an undesired past self to a new owner, then that likely assisted Toni in leaving her past self behind," Lastovicka and Fernandez wrote.

The healing effects of negative self-disclosures are well known.

— John Lastovicka, professor of marketing

A woman selling her wedding dress told a potential new owner that it was "a Cinderella dress" because it made her dreams come true. "Yes there is magic in that dress. If you do get the dress, whether or not you pass it to someone in the family, keep the magic going," she said. Lastovicka's interpretation is that the seller was trying to create a legacy — "conveying private meanings in the hope of perpetuating them."

Some people will sell certain items only to people they identify with, to a "shared self." Lastovicka's research included a retired master printer named Charles who had a garage sale. He wasn't going to sell his printing tools, even though he no longer used them — until he discovered an apprentice printer at the sale. Charles ended up giving the man a tool for free, and inviting him to return when Charles might be ready to part with more. An extension of self — fully charged with positive meanings — is eagerly transferred to a buyer who "truly understands and will maintain a possession's meaning," Lastovicka found. So what does all this mean for business?

"One thing our work has implications for is the sale of replacement products and services," Lastovicka said. "People can have a hard time letting go of a current possession — so they don't buy a new possession, or a replacement. It turns out that, when you talk to people about things they're having a hard time letting go of, they're not concerned with how a product performed or how well it was built, but they're concerned with the personal meanings associated with the product," he said.

"One thing marketers can do is try to think about this: How can you make a product 'sticky,' so that it will attract these personal meanings and be valuable to its owner?" The marketer also has to think about how to help a person part with a sticky product that is full of personal meanings, so the person buys a new one. "Those meanings have to be dealt with, one way or another, or there can be unfortunate consequences," Lastovicka said. "What sophisticated marketers need to realize is that they have to help people make that transition from the old to the new."

"We talk about cleansing rituals," he said. "People go through this with a personal computer. When they go from one computer to another, they say, "Oh, I'm cleaning the hard drive,' removing the things they don't want other people to see." Cell phone companies might be interested in cleansing rituals, he said. People ascribe all kinds of personal meanings to their cell phones: they program them with all kinds of personal information. "You've keyed a lot of stuff into that phone. Of course the cell phone providers want you to go on to the next model," he said. "Let's say they made it easy to take that meaning out — on a chip, say — and put it into a new phone.

That could help consumers upgrade to new phones and, if the chip is only compatible with certain brands, could influence the upgrade brand choice." That might help make a sale, "but what's going on is that the marketer has helped the consumer make that transition from old to new," Lastovicka said. Real estate is another realm where Lastovicka's research has application.

"Homes are a good example of meaningful possessions. People personalize their homes, they ascribe a lot of personal meanings to their homes," he said. That's why it's usually a good idea to sell your house through an agent, instead of handling it by yourself: You see your home as an extension of your self; the Realtor is free to treat it as an economic entity," Lastovicka said. "What Realtors will do, if you're having an open house, is advise you to take down all those family pictures and put up little mirrors in their place," to better reflect the prospective new owners, he said. "If you can clean out the personal meanings of the seller, it's easier for the buyers to see themselves living there."

Some sellers make portraits of their old house to take with them to a new place. That's what Lastovicka's research describes as "iconic transfer" — a way to psychologically hold on to something you're actually giving up. "If people understand how this works — if more consumers would do that — then more sales would be satisfactory."

Lastovicka is continuing his research into how people "manage meanings" of their possessions. His current interest is "sacred possessions" everyday items that somehow become exalted as magical. An example is Jimi Hendrix's guitar, on display at The Experience Music Project museum in Seattle. "There's 50-60 people there right now waiting reverently to get into this big glass room with relics of Jimi Hendrix. There's a stage set-up and Jimi's white Fender Stratocaster guitar. People are transfixed by this instrument," Lastovicka said. "Now this is a manufactured item. You can buy the same guitar in the same color in a music store for $800 — no waiting, and you don't have to pay $15 a ticket to a museum to get in," he said.

"My next project is to figure out what is the process by which mundane possessions become charged with the properties of the sacred," he said. "Say you're Fender Musical Instruments in Scottsdale. Man, that's something you'd really want to understand. How do you inject some of that magic in every instrument you sell?"