ASSOCIATION FOR CONSUMER RESEARCH Labovitz School of Business & Economics, University of Minnesota Duluth, 11 E. Superior Street, Suite 210, Duluth, MN 55802 Exploring Needs, Desires, and Hopes: a Study of Impoverished Migrated Consumers Berna Tari, Bilkent University, Turkey Ozlem Sandikci, Bilkent University, Turkey Sahver Omeraki, Bilkent University, Turkey Our main research question is how poor, rural-to-urban immigrant consumers talk about their needs, desires, and hopes and how their interpretations are structured by various institutional and cultural discourses and norms. We argue that migrated consumers are different from the urban poor; and that their desires and hopes are as important as their needs and wants. Results indicate that their needs and wants are shaped by what they observe in each others’ houses in the squatter area. The relation between desire and hope in our case reveals a different situation where one might desire an object without necessarily hoping it. [to cite]: Berna Tari, Ozlem Sandikci, and Sahver Omeraki (2008) ,"Exploring Needs, Desires, and Hopes: a Study of Impoverished Migrated Consumers", in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 35, eds. Angela Y. Lee and Dilip Soman, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 850-850. [url]: http://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/13557/volumes/v35/NA-35 [copyright notice]: This work is copyrighted by The Association for Consumer Research. For permission to copy or use this work in whole or in part, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center at http://www.copyright.com/.