People will pay more for an iPhone, or any product, if it is owned by someone the consumer has 'positive' envy of, such as a friend or celebrity they like, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

But it works the other way also; those with 'malicious' envy or contempt of someone who has a product would instead buy, for example, a BlackBerry instead of an iPhone.  The researchers say their discoveries about the motivations that result from different kinds of envy could be key to understanding marketing in the future.

"Note that two types of envy exist: benign and malicious envy," say authors Niels van de Ven, Marcel Zeelenberg, and Rik Pieters of Tilburg University. "Benign envy exists if the advantage of the other person is deserved, and motivates people to attain a coveted good or position for themselves. This more motivating type of envy makes people pay an envy premium for the products that elicited their envy."

On the other hand, malicious envy occurs if the other person is thought to be undeserving; it evokes a desire to "pull down" the other person.

In a series of experiments, the authors compared benign envy with its malicious cousin and found that only benignly envious people were willing to pay more for products that they coveted. 

In the experiments (not just iPhones but also things like potential internships), the participants were asked to imagine feeling jealousy and admiration for the fellow student (Benign Envy condition), to imagine feeling jealous and begrudging (the Malicious Envy condition), or just to imagine that they really liked the product (Control condition).

Maliciously envious people were more likely to but related but different products in order to be less like the other person - so malicious envy of a person with a Blackberry made an iPhone purchase more likely and vice-versa.
 
How much more?  "Our studies showed that people who had been made envious of someone who owned an iPhone were willing to pay 80 Euros more on average," the authors write.

However, companies should be cautious to not evoke the more negative form of envy that drives people away from products. "Advertisers should make sure that the celebrities they want to use in their ads actually deserve their status," the authors write. "If they do not, these celebrities might actually trigger malicious envy and the sales of products from a competitor could even go up."

So Stephen Hawking endorsing a phone might work at Science 2.0 but Kim Kardashian would likely not.  Good to know.