What marketers should understand about collectors—beyond hoarders and hobbyists

Berkeley Haas research explains the emotional truth about why humans collect.

Fire sprinkler heads. Five thousand of them. In nearly every style ever manufactured.

That’s what Ellen Evers encountered when she first ventured into the world of collectors at a Dutch showcase a decade ago: A man who had amassed a hoard of sprinkler heads and prided himself on his encyclopedic knowledge of them. It was exactly the stereotype she expected: an obsessive older man meticulously cataloging obscure items to display his knowledge—no matter how niche.

“He valued being the expert on fire sprinklers,” recalls Evers, now an assistant professor of marketing at Berkeley Haas.

But research by Evers and William Ryan, PhD 25, published in The Journal of the Association of Consumer Research, upends these common assumptions about collectors. Rather than the quirky compulsion of a few eccentrics, collecting is a widespread human behavior driven by our deepest emotional needs.

“We discovered nearly a third of people maintain collections,” says Evers, “They are actually people using pretty reasonable strategies to make sense of their lives and remember things they really care about.”

Myths vs. reality

From a consumer-behavior standpoint, collecting has presented a conundrum to marketers, running counter to the idea that the value of products comes from their material ability to improve people’s lives. “You’re buying products not for their functional purpose, but to possess them,” explains Ryan, who himself owns an extensive collection of vinyl, despite not owning a record player. “I like imagining what albums I would enjoy listening to. And it gives me something to do in a new city—go to a record store, browse, and then wander around.”

When Evers first began looking into collecting as a graduate student at Tillburg University in the Netherlands, research showed collectors are less interested in acquiring objects to use, and more interested in unique items, with strict self-imposed rules about what fit their collections. Studies also supported a narrow view of collectors as mostly older men with neurotic personalities focused on the mastery of a subject.

Even so, those studies relied on anecdotal evidence—such as the sprinkler afficionado she met at the collector’s fair. To gather a more complete picture, Evers turned to the LISS Panel, a longitudinal survey sponsored by the Dutch government that allows researchers to track habits and behaviors of thousands of citizens over time. In 2013, she added questions about collecting to a national survey and received more than 5,000 responses. A follow-up with 1,500 of the same participants, and a third round in 2023 with over 800 respondents, offered the rare ability to track changes in collecting behavior over a decade. Ryan joined the project after the first survey to assist with data analysis and natural language processing of responses.

When analyzing the data, the researchers were surprised to find that collecting was much more widespread than supposed, with roughly a third of the population saying they had a collection. The items they collected were also much more varied than expected, including DVDs, comic books, Swarovski crystals, Goebel angels, cat figurines, magnets, and shoes.

The most devoted collectors—those who ranked themselves a 5 on a 5-point scale of being a “true collector”—did indeed skew male by a 3-to-1 ratio. The overall pool of collectors, however, was almost evenly split between men and women. Comparing collectors and non-collectors by personality traits including extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, they also found their traits largely mirrored the general populace.

There was one exception: collectors ranked higher on openness to new experiences than the general population. That tracked with responses by collectors about why they collected, which was much less about status, mastery, or materialism, and much more about the desire to capture emotional memories through objects.

“In the same way that hearing a certain song takes you back to high school,” Ryan explains, “collectors are building memory associations through objects.” For example, a person might collect magnets from every National Park they’ve visited, or coasters of beer they enjoy drinking. “Now you have this physical thing that can spark a memory and bring you back.” Those who collected for memory-making reasons were also more committed, continuing to collect over time.

Other responses included a desire to connect with their heritage by collecting items related to a specific country or nationality, as well as an aesthetic appreciation of the objects. That motivation was particularly strong among women collecting items such as crystals and figurines—though Ryan notes that there may be a chicken-and-egg phenomenon wherein the act of collecting those items might deepen someone’s appreciation of them.

While the surveys focused on Dutch collectors, Evers and Ryan speculate their findings likely hold across cultures. “There are probably more Disney collections in the U.S.,” says Evers, “but the fundamentals are probably universal.”

Helping customers make memories

Evers and Ryan stress that their findings are preliminary, and more research is needed to truly understand collecting. The results do suggest that companies looking to market to customers based on the collecting urge should understand how objects create an emotional connection. Funko has developed a devoted following for its whimsical Funko Pop figurines that trigger collectors’ nostalgia for television and movie characters, while Hard Rock Café and Starbucks have found success in branded glasses and mugs available for purchase in geographic localities.

Ryan suggests that companies could play into experienced-based desires by linking availability of items to certain accomplishments, such as a video game that unlocks a chance to purchase merchandise when a player completes a certain level. Organizations can prime the pump for collections by offering items for free, such as National Park offering a promotional keychain at one location that inspires visitors to acquire similar items at another. “You give away one item,” Ryan says, “and people realize it’s helping them store memories. That might be a great way to get them to keep collecting.”

The data also show that collections naturally evolve—someone who starts with Tintin comics might expand to other Tintin-branded items, and then to work by the same illustrator—so having multiple items to collect might anticipate that growth. Consistency also matters, as Evers found with her own habit of collecting Starbucks mugs from cities she had visited—which came to an abrupt end. “I had 30 mugs, and then they changed the design and I was done,” she says.

Above all, the researchers say, it’s important for marketers to think less about who collects and more about why they do it. “There’s a temptation when trying to figure out customers to think about the strongest, most paradigmatic example,” Ryan says, “but sometimes that can be misleading, because the people who are really dedicated aren’t like most people. Rather than seek out this small, niche group of collectors to target, our research suggests it’s more about looking for circumstances that motivate people to collect these memories.”

Read the full paper:

There Is a Potential Collector in Every Consumer
By William H. Ryan, Ellen R. K. Evers, and Siegwart M. Lindenberg
Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, August 2025