Article’s

Materialism is the ‘devotion to material desires, to the neglect of spiritual matters; a way of life, based entirely upon material interests’ (The Oxford English Reference Dictionary, 1995). The materialism of the consumer represents the degree of attachment a consumer has to worldly possessions. The increased exposure of the consumer to occidental culture through media and in the backdrop of rapid economic growth and transforming societal norms in the urban parts of the country, an empirically oriented analysis was required to understand the details of the consumer materialistic tendencies. The tendency of materialism fetches both novelty and challenges for marketers in order to stabilize the demand and adding values to their products. The study is confined only to Bhubaneswar city and attempted to investigate the significance of gender difference in terms of materialistic tendencies of urban consumers to ensure availability of a valid and reliable means of measuring individual differences. The sample size consisted of 96 respondents under the age of 30, residing in the city of Bhubaneswar. Materialism was measured using the Richins and Dawson (1992), 18 – item, 5 – point, agreement – disagreement scale and subjected to t – test in order to compare materialism among the two independent samples consisting of men and women. The study revealed that in two of the eighteen variables used to measure materialism, there exists a significant difference between the materialistic tendencies of men and women living in urban India. Key-words: urban consumers, wellbeing, Novelty, Materialism, values, satisfaction.