34.12 Experiential consumption and time
Weingarten and Goodman (2020)
When compared to material items, purchasing experiences bring consumers more enjoyment.
The meta analysis found that it’s possible that the experiential advantage has less to do with happiness and willingness to pay and more to do with relatedness.
Negative experiences, isolated experiences, lower socioeconomic status consumers, and when experiences deliver a similar amount of utilitarian advantages as material items lessen the experiential advantage.
Oh and Pham (2021)
Experience of fun depends on
Hedonic engagement
A sense of liberation
4 situational facilitators:
Novelty
Social Connectedness
Spontaneity
Spatial/temporal boundedness
Fun is different from happiness (can view this article for arguments)
Huang, Lurie, and Mitra (2009)
The Internet blurs the lines between search and experience goods by lowering the costs of acquiring and sharing information and providing new methods to learn about products before purchasing them. Similarly, disparities in the types of information sought for search and experience products can lead to differences in the way customers gather information and make decisions online. In traditional retail locations, there are significant variations in customers’ perceived capacity to evaluate product quality before purchase between search and experience items, but these distinctions are obscured in online environments
Consumers spend equal amounts of time online obtaining information for both search and experiential products, but their browsing and purchasing behavior for these two types of goods differs significantly.
Experience goods need more depth (time per page) and less breadth (total number of pages) of searching than search goods. Furthermore, for experience products, free riding (buying from a shop other than the primary source of product information) is less common than for search goods. Finally, the existence of other consumers’ product reviews and multimedia that allow consumers to interact with products prior to purchase has a higher impact on consumer decision-making.
The inclusion of other customers’ product reviews and multimedia that allows consumers to interact with products prior to purchase has a bigger impact on consumer search and purchase behavior for experiences than for search goods.
Gilovich, Kumar, and Jampol (2015)
Experiential purchases provide more satisfaction and happiness than material purchases:
Purchases of experiences improve social relations more quickly and effectively than purchases of tangible stuff.
Experiential purchases are important in shaping a person’s identity.
Experiential purchases are judged on their own merits and do not elicit as many social comparisons as material purchases.
Chan and Mogilner (2016)
Regardless of whether the gift giver and recipient consume the item together, experiential gifts increase relationship strength more than financial gifts.
The boost in relationships that receivers get from experience gifts is due to the depth of emotion created when they consume the presents, rather than when they get them.
As a result, giving experiential gifts has been highlighted as a particularly successful kind of prosocial spending.
Tully and Sharma (2017)
Even though experiential purchases have a shorter physical lifespan, consumers are more likely to borrow for them than for material expenditures.
When a transaction is framed as more experience than material, people are more inclined to borrow.
- This effect emerges because customers’ sensitivity to missing out on scheduled consumption makes purchase time more essential for experience purchases.
Dai, Chan, and Mogilner (2019)
Based on Amazon reviews and experiments, Consumer reviews are less likely to be trusted for experiential purchases than they are for material ones.
This impact stems from the idea that ratings of experiences are less representative of the purchase’s objective quality than reviews of actual objects. These findings reveal not only how word of mouth influences different types of purchases, but also the psychological mechanisms that underpin customers’ reliance on consumer reviews. Furthermore, these findings imply that people are less responsive to being instructed what to do than what to have, as one of the first examinations into how people choose among numerous experience and material buying possibilities.