Masstige Consumption and the Reinvention of Rural-Urban Identity Among Return Migrants in India: An Ethno-Netnographic Study

Abstract

Currently, Instagram serves as a cultural space where Indian Gen Z and millennial consumers construct and perform aspirational identities through strategic brand application. Within this context, masstige brands offer these consumers a powerful medium to express their status, culture, and social belonging without overt elitism. Although previous literature has dealt with masstige consumption and identity separately, the functioning of these forces in an image oriented, non-Western digital ecosystem is unaddressed. This study examines how young Indian consumers utilize masstige brand identification on Instagram to signal their identity, community, and values. We combine ethnographic and netnographic qualitative methods. In the ethnographic aspect, a six-week study was carried out which included participant observations of 12 purposively selected test subjects (aged 18-32) from Tier 1 and Tier 2 Indian cities. For the netnography, we considered 158 Instagram posts featuring masstige brands (Zara, H&M, Mamaearth, OnePlus). In addition, we documented field notes and analyzed post captions and hashtag usage. Thematic coding following Spradley's ethnographic domains and Kozinets' procedures for netnographic immersion guided the analysis. Masstige-linked digital identity construction has five key drivers: aspirational aesthetics, moral consumption cues, relatability, peer validation, and symbolic community belonging. On the other hand, the findings identified several significant barriers: vanity judgment fears, algorithmic biases, platform fatigue, gendered pressures, and the perceived lack of authenticity in tech masstige brands. The study exposed masstige consumption as an intensely cultural matter, resolving the problematic tensions between visibility and modesty, on the one hand, and performance and authenticity, on the other. Moreover, the originality of this study resides precisely in its methodological merging of an offline ethnographic immersion with online content analysis in the pursuit of a complete horizontal mapping of masstige identity signaling in the Indian Instagram economy. Ultimately, there are practical implications for brand managers and platform designers in the youth markets of emerging economies.