Personalising the Home Karen Fernandez, The University of Auckland Abstract This interpretive study examines the ends achieved by personalising the home, and in doing so, adds to our knowledge of place and possession attachment. Personalising a dwelling can literally and figuratively warm it up, and can help create a home. Personalising a home can facilitate the creation of identity and communicate that identity to both residents and non- residents. Personalisation can also act to demarcate and protect the territories of the home. Personalisation stems from, and contributes to, home attachment. Introduction Australasian consumers, public policy makers, and media are perennially concerned with the ownership of the ultimate consumption durable, the home. Not only is the home generally the single largest purchase that most consumers make in their lifetimes, personalising a home requires many subsequent purchases (Clairborne and Ozanne, 1990). Consequently, understanding consumers’ personalisation of their homes is also relevant to marketers, particularly those in the real estate, home furnishing and interior decorating industries. Even though environmental psychologists have studied the concept of home for more than three decades (Moore 2000), there appears to be little research in the marketing literature that explicitly focuses on consumers’ relationships with the homes they inhabit. This paper examines the ends which are achieved by the multi-faceted act of personalising a home, and in doing so, adds to our knowledge of place and possession attachment. The home is an ideal research context in which to examine how personalisation relates to possession and place attachment concurrently because the home is simultaneously a possession and a place that contains multiple other possessions and places. Theoretical Foundations Possession Attachment and Extended Self Material possessions (“possessions”) are specific objects (as opposed to product classes or brands) that have been psychologically appropriated (Kleine and Baker 2004). Possession attachment is the bonding of people to possessions that have been decommodified and singularised over time (Kleine and Baker 2004). Key among possession attachment studies is Belk’s (1988) conceptualisation of the extended self. According to Belk (1988), consumers can extend themselves by experiencing their selves “through concrete sets of persons, places and things” (Tian and Belk 2005, p.297). Belk (1988) explains that consumers can incorporate a possession into self through controlling or appropriating its use, creating it, knowing it intimately, and by contaminating it. This stream of research has focused on the meaning of possessions, how they are incorporated into self, and how they subsequently serve to define and communicate self-identity. Although the home has been explicitly identified as one of the key components of extended self (Belk 1988) and the locus of most of 2255