More Experience, Less Loneliness? Exploring the Effect of Experiential Purchases on the Alleviation of Loneliness

Over the past few decades, researchers have explored the effects of experiential purchases and material purchases on happiness and provided a range of evidence that consumers yield greater happiness from experiential purchases compared with material purchases. However, limited research is known about the relationship between these two types of purchases within the broader context of negative emotion. Specifically, the current research focuses on the effect of experiential purchases on loneliness alleviation to replenish this research stream. Three experiments were conducted to explore the effect of experiential purchases (vs. material purchases) on alleviating loneliness. The results showed that experiential purchases have a stronger effect on loneliness alleviation than material purchases, which is mediated by relationship enhancement. In addition, purchases of social nature moderate the effect of experiential purchases on loneliness. Social experiential purchases lead to a higher degree of relief of loneliness. On the contrary, for the solitary experiential purchases, the effect of experiential purchases on loneliness is less tight. The current research supplements the research on negative emotions of experiential purchases and expands the research area of experiential purchases, which also provides new insights into coping strategies of loneliness.

Activity apprehension in experiential purchases

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine how the number of activities within a multi-activity experience influences consumer preferences before and after consumption. Design/methodology/approach The hypotheses are tested using four experiments and a secondary data set from a river cruise firm that includes first-time river cruise purchases by consumers from this firm between January 2011 and December 2015 (n = 337,457). Findings Consumers prefer experiences with fewer (vs more) activities before consumption – a phenomenon, this paper calls “activity apprehension” – but prefer experiences with more (vs fewer) activities after consumption. A mediation analysis indicates that this phenomenon occurs because the highly perishable nature of activities makes consumers uncertain about their ability to use all the activities within the experience (usage uncertainty). Practical implications Evaluations of a multi-activity experience depend on both the number of activities and on whether the consumer is at the pre- or post-consumption stage of the customer journey. As such, firms looking to sell multi-activity experiences should design and promote these experiences in a way that minimizes activity apprehension. Originality/value This study is the first to demonstrate that consumer perceptions of an optimal experience depend on both the number of included activities and on the stage of the customer journey (i.e. pre- or post-purchase). It further contributes to the consumer experience literature by examining an unexplored activity characteristic, perishability, in shaping experiential purchase decisions. Finally, it demonstrates a new way in which experiential purchases differ from tangible product purchases.

People Rely Less on Consumer Reviews for Experiential than Material Purchases

An increasingly prevalent form of social influence occurs online where consumers read reviews written by other consumers. Do people rely on consumer reviews differently when making experiential purchases (events to live through) versus when making material purchases (objects to keep)? Though people often use consumer reviews both when making experiential and material purchases, an analysis of more than six million reviews on Amazon.com and four laboratory experiments reveal that people are less likely to rely on consumer reviews for experiential purchases than for material purchases. This effect is driven by beliefs that reviews are less reflective of the purchase’s objective quality for experiences than for material goods. These findings not only indicate how different types of purchases are influenced by word of mouth, but also illuminate the psychological processes underlying shoppers’ reliance on consumer reviews. Furthermore, as one of the first investigations into how people choose among various experiential and material purchase options, these findings suggest that people are less receptive to being told what to do than what to have.

The Material-Experiential Asymmetry in Discounting: When Experiential Purchases Lead to More Impatience

Consumers routinely make decisions about the timing of their consumption, making tradeoffs between consuming now or later. Most of the literature examining impatience considers monetary outcomes (i.e., delaying dollars), implicitly assuming that how the money is spent does not systematically alter impatience levels and patterns. The authors propose an impatience asymmetry for material and experiential purchases based on utility duration. Five studies provide evidence that consumers are more impatient toward experiential purchases compared to material purchases and that this increased impatience is driven by whether the value is extracted over a shorter utility duration (often associated with experiential purchases) or a longer utility duration (often associated with material purchases). Thus, when an experience is consumed over a longer period of time, the results show that impatience can be diminished. Additional results show that the effect holds in both delay and expedite frames and suggest that the results cannot be explained by differences in scheduling, time sensitivity, affect, ownership, future time perspective, or future connectedness.

Comparing conspicuous consumption across different experiential products: Culture and leisure

Consumer behavior recently underwent three main developments: a shift from material purchases to immaterial experiences, a shift from signaling status and wealth by means of consumer behavior to signaling identity, and increased social visibility due to the growing importance of social media. These trends did arouse a renewed interest in the concept of conspicuous consumption in the area of experiential purchases. Seven different types of experiential purchases are compared as regards the role of conspicuous consumption: the main summer holiday and participation in six different types of cultural events. In the culture study, the same measurement tools were used as in the leisure study. It was found that conspicuous consumption plays a role in these types of purchases. This holds true for status demonstration as well as for identity demonstration. However, there are substantial differences between the different types of cultural events. Conspicuous consumption is important to those who attend festivals, classical music concerts, and pop concerts and is of minor importance as regards going to movies. Based on these findings, we propose a tentative theory about the relationship between conspicuous consumption and type of experiential purchase. Practical implications for marketing are sketched out. In cultural marketing for museums, the performing arts, and cinema, attention should be paid not only to the quality of the event for the self-experience, but also to its status and identity-signaling potential to relevant others.