The Collecting Mindset: Viewing Purchasing as Collecting Enhances Acquisition Experience and Product Desirability

Managers often struggle to make acquisition processes engaging. While the dominant approach to reducing search costs has been to streamline the acquisition process, seven preregistered studies plus one supplemental study (N = 3,306) reveal an alternative pathway: Prompting consumers to view purchasing as "collecting" by positioning products as additions to their own collections, rather than as ad hoc purchases, improves consumers' acquisition experience and increases product desirability. The authors demonstrate that activating such a collecting mindset shifts consumers' psychological focus of the shopping process from securing a standalone product to instead investing in advancing their collection, thereby making them derive positive experience utility from the process, and in turn, elevating the desirability of the sought products. This research also offers practical guidance on how marketers can maximize the effectiveness of activating a collecting mindset: (i) encouraging active engagement in search, (ii) ensuring that search yields products that meaningfully advance the collection, and (iii) aligning the collection with an identity consumers value, as the effect may otherwise attenuate or reverse. These findings advance theory on everyday collecting and consumer search, and show how retailers and brands can strategically turn purchasing into a more positive acquisition experience that enhances product desirability.