Consuming Experience

Antonella Caru,Bernard Cova

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136009662
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Commerce Général

This book covers the 'hot topic' of the experiential consumption in an accessible manner and from a unique industry perspective which is not used in any other book. It highlights the idea that an experience is not something that can be readily managed by firms and is not limited to the market: an individual's daily life is made up of consuming experiences that can occur with or without a market relation.

Offering an overview of the consumption experience, it outlines a continuum of experiences of consumption that consumers go through, including:

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• those that are mainly constructed by consumers around small items that comprise their daily life, such as organic products and non-profit or local associations
• those that have been co-developed by companies and consumers: tourism or adventure projects, rock concerts and cultural events
• those that have been largely developed by the companies where consumers are immersed in a hyper-real context such as fashion, sports brands, edutainment and retail.

Broad and comprehensive, this book provides a challenging vision of the consumption experience, which is an invaluable tool for all those studying marketing and consumer behaviour.

Part I
Setting up the scene of
the consumer experience

Chapter 1
Consuming experiences
An introduction

Antonella Carù and Bernard Cova

KEY POINTS

• It is through consumption that people build up and reinforce their identities.
• Today consumers seek to experience immersion into thematic settings rather than merely to encounter finished products.
• The production of a consuming experience includes staging, active customer participation, and a narrative.
• Experiential marketing aims at creating extraordinary experiences for consumers.
• People's daily life is made up of consuming experiences that can occur with or without a market relation.

After the marketing mid-life crisis during the 1980s, many marketers were hoping that the 1990s would involve a refocusing on relationship marketing and customer relationship management (CRM), a solid and innovative concept that highlights the relational sphere and its derivatives. Fifteen years on, this approach appears unfortunately to have gone as far as it can, largely due to marketing's excessive rationalizing of the relationship between firms and consumers. As a result, the discipline is now placing its hopes on the concept of “Experience,” a notion that first arose in consumption and marketing studies in a seminal article written by Holbrook and Hirschman (1982): “The Experiential Aspects of Consumption: Consumer Fantasy, Feelings and Fun.” Twenty years later, experience has evolved to become a key element in the understanding of hedonistic consumer behavior. It has also become the main foundation for an experience economy (Pine and Gilmore, 1999), recently followed by the advent of experiential marketing (Schmitt, 1999, 2003), an area that tends to highlight immersion in consuming experiences as opposed to the mere purchasing of simple products or services. This type of marketing is supposed to offer a response to the existential desires of today's consumers.

AN EXPERIENTIAL VIEW OF CONSUNMPTION

Since the 1960s and 1970s, consumption has progressively disengaged from its essentially utilitarian conception, one that was based on products' and services' use value. Consumption has become an activity that involves a production of meaning, as well as a field of symbolic exchanges. Consumers do not consume products or services. Quite the contrary, they consume the products' meanings and images, and take it for granted that an object will fulfill certain functions. It is the object's image that makes the difference. Although it may seem surprising to talk about meanings and symbols in those areas that have tended to be dominated by marketing and commercial objectives, it is despite and beyond such objectivism that a product can turn into a vector of esthetics. Latently and manifestly, the 1980s were an era when the estheticization of everyday life (and its corollary, hedonism) infiltrated the field of consumption. Consumers became progressively perceived as emotional beings seeking sensorial experiences that they could derive from their interactions with the products and services found in the market system. What this entails is an embodiment of meanings in the form of experiences. Individuals are put on stage in a way that emphasizes sensuality and the significance of the experiences they live through. Consuming experiences have been theorized as personal and subjective experiences that people go through, ones that are often laden with emotionality for the consumer (Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982).

Since then, consumer behavior researchers (Addis and Holbrook, 2001) have tried to rebalance the functional and utilitarian vision of consumption by applying a so-called experiential perspective that focuses on hedonistic values and individual subjectivity (Figure 1.1). Heir to a tradition that is both microeconomic and psychological (whether behaviorist or cognitivist) in nature, the customary utilitarian vision of consumption highlights the search

Figure 1.1 The experiential vision of consumption (adapted from Addis and Holbrook, 2001).

for information and the multiattribute processing of mechanisms of influence — the aim being to optimize transactions undertaken by isolated individuals. Inversely, in an experiential perspective, consumers are less interested in maximizing their benefits and more focused on hedonistic gratification within a given social context. Consumption here provokes sensations and emotions that do much more than merely respond to an individual's own needs, as they also touch upon the consumer's search for an identity. In the view of many sociologists, the vehicle for an individual's construction of his/her identity is no longer work (in other words, productive activity), but consumption. On the other hand, philosophers, poets, and moralists who study the culture have questioned whether people work to live or whether they live to work. The dilemma that has come to preoccupy our contemporaries can usually be formulated thus: should we consume to live or should we live to consume? Today, people consume mainly to exist (identity) and not only to live (needs). It is through consumption that people build up and reinforce their identities, which are increasingly eroded by factors such as unemployment, divorce, the break-up of a family, mobility, etc. We no longer simply “run a few errands” — we now “live experiences,” usually ones that are embodied as they call upon all of our senses.

THE CONSUMING EXPERIENCE

The origin of the concept of experience can be found in the romantic currents of the eighteenth century, that is in a way of life that emphasized change, diversity, and imagination (Holbrook, 1997). The goal here was the development of an interesting life in which an individual could feel fulfilled and complete. Romanticism associated the search for intensive pleasure with states of extreme emotional excitement, contrasting them with the lukewarm mediocrity of daily life. Combined with western society's quest for an identity, this led to a search for experiences. The more individuals focused on their own life, the more they demanded that the trivialities of their daily existence be imbued with meaning. Living experiences became the only thing of any interest. This turned the consumer into a romantic hero, the romance here being his/her daily life.

The salient attributes of experiential consumption are as follows:

• consumers are not only consumers;
• consumers act within situations;
• consumers seek meaning;
• consumption involves more than mere purchasing.

In the experiential perspective, the consumption experience is no longer limited to pre-purchase activities (stimulation of a need, search for information, assessment, etc.) or to postpurchase activities (assessment of satisfaction), but includes a series of other activities that influence consumers' decisions and future actions. As such, consuming experiences are spread over a period of time that can be divided into four major stages (Arnould et ah, 2002):

• the preconsumption experience, which involves searching for, planning, day-dreaming about, and foreseeing or imagining the experience;
• the purchasing experience, which involves choosing the item, payment, packaging, and the encounter with the service and the environment;
• the core consumption experience, which involves sensation, satiety, satisfaction/dissatisfaction, irritation/fow, and transformation;
• the remembered consumption experience and the nostalgia experience, in which photographs are used to relive a past experience based on narratives and arguments with friends about the past, something that tends toward the classification of memories.

As a result, the consuming experience is more than a mere shopping experience, e.g., an individual's experience at a point-of-sale (also called a service encounter in services research). This concept of a shopping experience has, since the 1970s, been based on a series of studies that have looked at purchasing behavior at the point-of-sale and tried to supersede the hypothesis of consumer rationality. What was first revealed was a so-called recreative type of consumer. Broader studies that were conducted subsequently highlighted hedonistic behavior in most consumers, diverting attention away from the utilitarian to the hedonistic value of shopping. In these studies, the consumer is seen as an individual who is emotionally involved in a shopping process in which multisensory, imaginary, and emotive aspects are specifically sought after and appreciated. Retailing research converged here with sociological studies that focused on the same issues (Falk and Campbell, 1997), the assumption being that the enjoyment derived from shopping does not stem from buying, wanting, or desiring products, but that shopping is a socioeconomic means of socializing and enjoying oneself and the company of others while making purchases. Hedonistic and utilitarian motivations thus become so closely intertwined that it would seem wrong to countermand them. Examples of shopping experiences range from cultural consumption in a museum to spectacular consumption at Nike Town, Chicago.

Although shopping was initially deemed to constitute the main field of experiential consumption, today, it would appear that the explosion of subjectivity has generalized throughout western society, thereby extending the experiential domain to all sectors of consumption. Some would even characterize modern consumption as something akin to the pleasure of being immersed in McDisneyfed banalities. Having said that, there is little agreement as to the source and level of pleasure that consumers derive from such experiences. For some observers (particularly for specialists in what has been called “retail re-enchantment”), pleasure stems from a McDonald's-type experiential shaping of daily banalities. They say that the re-enchantment of our daily lives entails a whole succession of micropleasures, recurring affordable microtreats that derive from in-store consuming experiences. Through a number of polysensorial stimulations, consumption here is transformed into an entertainment opportunity and into a hedonic experience. For other analysts, notably the proponents of postmodern marketing (Firat and Dholakia, 1998), what pleasure offers is a total immersion in an original experience. Here, the emphasis is on modern consumers' growing quest for immersion in varied experiences, their aim being to explore the multiplicity of new meanings they can inject into their lives. The idea is that a consumer comes to market to produce his/her identity, so that s/he is in fact seeking the experience of being immersed in a thematized framework rather than a mere encounter with some finished product. These immersions in enclavized and secure contexts contrast with the stress of people's daily lives, and sometimes go as far as to help them to live other persons' experiences. This immersion in a consuming experience is tantamount to diving into a framework that has been totally thematized, enclavized, and made secure. One notable example of this is Rainforest Café.

Whether at the level of a simple experiential shaping or at the deeper level of a total immersion in a thematized framework, experiential consumption (construed as a staging in which individuals find themselves surrounded by a vast symbolic system) appears to be indistinguishable from the advent of simulations and virtuality. One of the main dimensions of today's consumption is what the sociologist Baudrillard (1988) once termed hyper-reality. We increasingly satisfy ourselves with a reality composed of images, accepting copies as a substitute for anything else. Our secret is that we no longer want originality with its harsh reality, preferring sweetened artifices instead. We find copies to be truer than the reality they are supposed to represent. Even more poignantly, today reality seems to have disappeared — all we have left are images, illusions, and simulations, i.e., copies of real things, manifestations without any origins or intrinsic reality. Images have become incapable of imagining reality, because that is what they themselves have become (Baudrillard, 1988). Most postmodern examples of hyper-reality involve the consumption of leisure-oriented simulations. Without even mentioning Disney World (which is no more or less than one gigantic simulation), Aquaboulevard and other facilities such as Center Parcs offer interesting examples of simulated beaches and parks that some consumers prefer to real beaches and parks. All in all, today we can clearly observe consumers' tendency to prefer simulated experiences to reality. Moreover, these simulated experiences have become increasingly spectacular and extravagant (Ritzer, 1999).

THE PRODUCTION OF EXPERIENCES

Although it is widely accepted within an experiential perspective that consumers are not passive agents reacting to stimuli but, instead, the actors and the producers of their own consuming experiences (however hyper-real these may be), firms have nevertheless worked hard to facilitate the production of such experiences. The methods advanced to enable firms to (co)-produce experiences on consumers' behalf have one point in common — they try to create a theater and a stage for both the consumer and what the company is offering. This is achieved through in-depth work on the decor, i.e., on the environmental design and on the atmosphere at the point-of-sale. When a firm or a brand delivers only products and not services, it is advisable that it create its own premises (theaters of consumption) so that the consumer can experience its products without the intrusion of any competing influences. This is what happens in Nike Towns or in other concept or flagship stores. Further examples include Nutella (hazelnut spread) restaurants or Nespresso cafés. The commercial premises' design m...