Downwardly mobile: When consumer decisions are influenced by people with lower socioeconomic status

A lot of advertising uses 'high status' role models to stimulate consumer desire. However this study (Downwardly mobile: When consumer decisions are influenced by people with lower socioeconomic status) shows that people may actually look sometimes to lower status people to emulate:

under certain circumstances higher status consumers are more likely to emulate the choices of lower status people, a phenomenon called the "low status user effect." For example, observing a janitor using the latest tech gadget may lead a person of higher status to question his own technological innovativeness. "This scenario might lead the observer to think: if a lower socioeconomic status person owns the latest tech gadget and I don't, what does this mean about my relative technological innovativeness?" The authors found that the low status user effect only occurs when the product symbolizes a clear and desirable trait and when the observer is unconfident about her relative standing on that trait.

Actually this isn't surprising if we consider the matter of emulation more widely. For example in language we know that for some speakers forms of speech that may be considered 'lower status' may actually be what they wish to emulate because of the symbolic value of those 'lower status' speakers as fashionable or 'cool' or 'hard' or some other desirable trace which may not be conventionally linked to their socio-economic status. This is further linkable to the way that fashion is often led by trends in black and working class youth culture. It's actually about what is considered desirable and that may not actually be linked to 'fame and fortune' or wealth but rather to other traits such as 'hipness' or cultural creativity or lifestyle or ... well, you get the picture.