City Research Online

Abstract

The consumption process constitutes a sequence of acquisition, use/consumption, and disposal. Over the last two decades, acquisition has transformed due to digitization and sharing economy innovations. Consumers obtain goods and services through several practices beyond buying, including renting, sharing, streaming, borrowing, and gifting. Access constitutes equal options to ownership, and non-market-mediated exchanges have become alternatives to market exchanges. While research has begun to study these practices, it remains fragmented, and we lack a unifying conceptual framework of acquisition. This gap risks marketers overlooking the acquisition phase, the essential first touchpoint in the customer journey. We develop a new conceptual acquisition framework organized by the levels of ownership transfer and market mediation. It distinguishes four acquisition modes: market-mediated ownership, market-mediated access, non-market-mediated ownership, and non-market-mediated access. We extend the acquisition concept beyond buying and market exchange, contributing to research on access, sharing, and customer journey, and we advance a future research agenda.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Publisher Keywords:	Acquisition, Consumption process, Market-exchange, Ownership, Access-based consumption, Renting, Sharing, Gifting
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HB Economic Theory
Departments:	Bayes Business School Bayes Business School > Faculty of Management
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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