{"id":2447,"date":"2024-04-05T00:35:34","date_gmt":"2024-04-05T00:35:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/?p=2447"},"modified":"2024-10-19T14:12:17","modified_gmt":"2024-10-19T14:12:17","slug":"consuming-emotions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/consuming-emotions\/","title":{"rendered":"Consuming Emotions"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

(image Pixabay<\/a>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The simplest way of thinking about emotions in consumer behaviour is that they are things that we buy. Obviously, you can’t sell emotions directly – not until someone invents a brain implant that stimulates your emotion centres directly#up. But we find ways to buy emotions nevertheless. For instance:<\/p>\n\n\n

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#down. There are certainly chemicals you can consume that will directly alter the activity in the mood centers in your brain, but these are generally illegal, and their use tends to end poorly for consumers in the long run <\/pre>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n
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A food that you are very unlikely to buy for its nutritive or stomach-filling properties (credit<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
A cake like this could provide the energy needed to keep your body alive. But let’s be honest, that’s not why we buy it. If putting it in our mouth doesn’t make us happy#up we will likely feel annoyed at our choice.<\/p>\n\n\n
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#down. Possibly along with other feelings too. Psychologists have a word, \"ambivalent\", which refers to having mixed positive and negative feelings about a thing<\/pre>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n
Or consider this:<\/p>\n\n\n
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“ahhh” (credit<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
If you bought this massage and didn’t feel relaxed and happy afterwards you would again feel like you had misspent your money#up.<\/p>\n\n\n
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#down. Unless it was a sports massage, in which case the purpose is to release spasms from overused muscles. That kind has very little to do with fun<\/pre>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n
A distinction is often made in CB between “hedonic<\/strong>” consumption, which is done for immediate pleasure, and “utilitarian<\/strong>” consumption which is made looking for more practical benefits#up. Our examples with the cake and massage are both about hedonic consumption. An example of utilitarian consumption might be buying a screwdriver to tighten a loose kitchen cabinet door.<\/p>\n\n\n
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#down. Of course many of our purchases are made out of habit, without the need to do any new thinking about their benefits at all. We found whatever it is good for a long time ago, and now we can pick up new ones without re-doing all that thinking<\/pre>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n
Are hedonic and utilitarian consumption really completely different?<\/h5>
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Admittedly the line can be a little blurry at times. If you enjoy fixing things as a hobby, then you could be quite excited about buying a screwdriver and a bag of screws because you are so engaged with each step in this larger project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Generally, though, some purchases tend to draw more immediate emotional responses from people than others. Buying broccoli might help you live a longer and happier life in the long run, but there aren’t many people who are excited to lift it off the shelf at a supermarket, or to shovel it into their mouth when it is cooked at home#up. It is that initial emotional reaction that makes a purchase ‘hedonic’.<\/p>\n\n\n
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#down. And those people are lucky indeed to have such healthy tastes!<\/pre>\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
More than just physical pleasures<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
There are lots of ways that products can be hedonic beyond just tasting nice or giving nice bodily sensations like a massage might. They can involve play, aesthetics, or be more complicated still.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Play<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Consumers engage in a lot of play (or “ludic consumption” if you want to sound more scholarly). <\/p>\n\n\n\n
This can involve obvious board games (e.g., Monopoly, Hungry Hippos), computer games (Fortnite, Roblox), or physical sports.<\/p>\n\n\n
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Play (credit<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
We don’t just play games ourselves, though, we also sometimes pay to watch other people play games, live or streamed on our screens (listen to the emotion in the crowd here<\/a> to witness intense enjoyment of a game that one isn’t playing in oneself). It is not only physical sports people watch, but increasingly video games too; In tournaments<\/a> or live-streamed<\/a> during routine play.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dedicated sports fans don’t watch the games just for the inherent drama of a particular game as it unfolds, but as elaborate forms of play in which they also experience being with other fans together, and sharing storylines, watching skills, and the lore of their team in playful ways <\/span>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And it isn’t just sports. We watch shows, read books, listen to music (live and recorded), we sometimes dance too. And we go to theatres, circuses, stand-up comedy events, parades, and more. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
We even go to big meet-ups dressed as fictional characters – so called ‘cosplay’ <\/span>.<\/p>\n\n\n
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Malaysian cosplayers (credit<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
Humans are very inventive about finding fun through play.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aesthetics & luxury<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Beautiful things can stir emotions in us. From the tranquil beauty of a still pond, to the fluffy beauty of a pretty cat, to the satisfying experience of a door that swings gently shut with a satisfying ‘clunk’. Making a product that is in some way beautiful can add an emotional element to its consumption that makes the experience more valuable to us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But don’t we all disagree about what is beautiful?<\/h5>
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Absolutely. People disagree about aesthetics constantly and often very strongly. In your author’s opinion blue cheese is wonderful, in their spouse’s opinion#up it is not. <\/p>\n\n\n
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#down. Which is incorrect!<\/pre>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n
From a marekting perspective there is bad news in this, and good news.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The bad news<\/h6>\n\n\n\n
When you design your product it’s a good idea to test your choices on a lot of consumers to see if you are getting them right. The problem is that doing this will give you a lot of violently conflicting opinions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Look at a meta-review site like rottentomatoes.com and you will see almost no films getting 100% or 0% positive reviews. This is true even for really big budget films that were made by hundreds of top professionls with near endless money for audience-testing. Take 2021’s ‘Dune’. It gets 83% positive reviews<\/a> (“Director Denis Villeneuve never misses and succeeds again in this adaptation”) which is a good achievement, but yet about a fifth of reviewers did not like it (“watching it is rather like having huge marble monoliths dropped on you for two and a half hours”). Public judgments are divided like this on nearly everything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And it gets worse. If you recall the so-called ‘laws’ of emotion from our quick intro<\/a>, our feelings tend to lead us into making strong opinions (this is the ‘law’ of closure), which are often experienced as being obvioulsy true (the ‘law’ of apparent reality). Whatever strong feelings you or I might have about a given film or other product, we might have difficulty imagining that anyone else would disagree with us (and, when they do, we might be tempted to dismiss their opinion as misinformed or simply wrong). This felt-certainty can lead to big mistakes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The good news<\/h6>\n\n\n\n
While nothing is going to please all of the people all of the time, it rarely ever has to. A basic truth of the mass-market consumer world is that it generally doesn’t matter if some people hate your product, so long as a big enough segment do want to buy it.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
The easiest to see how aesthetics can add emotion to a product is by looking at examples. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Take a restaurant. They all give you food and usually a place to eat it, but some restaurants also make that place look like this:<\/p>\n\n\n
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Anyone hungry? (credit<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
Someone went to a lot of trouble to create that climbing-plant decor, the wooden pillars and arched windows, and find chairs with mosaics on their backs. The reason they went to all that effort was to create an aesthetic ambience that could create an emotional state – presumably a peaceful one with maybe a little bit of awe at the lengths they went to. Perhaps you appreciate that aesthetic, and perhaps you don’t, but their hope will be that many people do react positively to it, and that these people will find an added emotional experience from eating food there, and that this may make it more attractive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is the principle behind luxury<\/strong>. You take a normal product and add an emotional element by using higher-quality materials, and\/or a well-crafted design. The aesthetic experience of seeing, touching, tasting, or using the products adds in a layer of emotion that some people find pleasing, and businesses generally charges extra for this added value.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Take the example of this handbag:<\/p>\n\n\n
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Not your average bag (credit<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
It holds all the same things that its rivals do, but is made with (what appears to be) a high grade of leather, with intricate stitched patterns, artfully designed handles, and it is assembled to aesthetically pleasing proportions. This makes it beautiful to at least some people, which might lead them to desire it, and be willing to pay extra for it. Someimes people pay a lot<\/strong> extra for bags (i.e., hundreds of thousands, even millions<\/a> of dollars).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Desiginers with an artistic flair can be in demand to turn products, retail spaces, and services into more luxurious experiences, by using different materials (stone and metal and even high grade plastics), by manipulating the size and shape of spaces (see the “golden ratio<\/a>“), by using clever lighting, and by training employees to treat consumers differently. High end hotels will have concierge employees who are able to find nearly anything that their guests might want, from hard-to-find theatre tickets to special clothes at short notice for a surprise event.<\/p>\n\n\n
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A mall in Melbourne Australia which makes artistic use of light, materials, colours, neo-classical proportions, shapes (look at those semi-circular windows and the pattern inlayed in the floor) to try to evoke an emotional response (image credit<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
Luxuries don’t need to sell for staggeringly high prices though. Starbucks became famous for selling coffee that was a little nicer than many of the previous options, but for 2 to 4 times the price.<\/p>\n\n\n
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(credit<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
While Starbucks drinks were more expensive than others, they were still an amount that most Americans could afford, at least for an occasional purchase ($4 per day times 365 days of a year is nearly $1,500 – it can add up). Many other brands now offer this same idea of “affordable luxuries” (see, for instance. Kettle brand crisps#up). Choose the right name, packaging, image, and taste, etc, and many consumers will ‘trade up’ on routine purchases, adding a little cost to receive a slightly more emotionally satisfying experience (or so they expect).<\/p>\n\n\n
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#down. Or \"chips\" depending what side of the Atlantic your English comes from<\/pre>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n
Wait, I thought luxury was about status?<\/h5>
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Excellent point. It often is. Many humans experience a thrill at having things that lots of others want, but can’t get. Such a sense of exclusivity can be another way to add emotion into a product. Others perhaps worry about how they will be judged, and feel relief at using luxury goods to show that they have at least the same status as others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There was a time when exclusivity was a key defining feature of luxury goods. Luxuries were considered to be things like fur coats and large diamond rings that were too pricey for most consumers. Wearing them meant showing off resources that others did not have. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some luxury still carries this function. Think of high-end handbags and cars, etc. Other luxuries do not. Think of the affordable luxuries like Starbucks and Kettle crisps\/chips. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
That said, luxury products almost always do have a higher price tag. Partly this is just retailers maximizing their profits, and partly it may be due to the ‘price-quality heuristic’ leading people to be suspicious of the quality of cheap goods. Partly, though, it can still very much be about status signalling; An enjoyment from showing off one’s ability to afford the pricier options.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Either way, though, luxury almost always does still carry an element of superior materials and\/or design (one has to justify that higher price somehow), and it is always <\/strong>ultimately about adding an element of emotion. <\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
Buying negative emotions?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Here’s a question: Do people ever buy negative emotions as a core benefit? Where making you feel bad is the job that you hire the prorduct to do for you?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Obviously we buy things where negative emotions are a nasty surprise, and we are willing to tolerate negative emotions from some purchases in order to get some larger benefit (i.e., playing games all night even knowing you’ll feel tired and guilty in the morning).  But the negative emotion is not the core benefit in these cases. You would be more satisfied with the product if the negative emotion never happened <\/span>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So are there things that you would be disappointed with consuming if they didn’t<\/strong> give you a negative emotion? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Our answers (see if you can think of your own first)<\/h5>
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Here are four examples. You can surely find more:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Horror movies<\/p>\n\n\n
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If you don’t feel scared watching it you’ll leave disappointed and tell your friends not to bother (credit<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
Interestingly, there is research showing that we enjoy being scared by emotions from horror movies <\/span> and getting similarly negative emotions from TV shows <\/span> when we don’t feel personally threatened them. They are fun when we are aware that it is all for pretend. We might find it entertaining to watch people pretending to run away from a deranged killer, but not so much if we had to run away from an actual killer ourselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Tearjerker movies<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometimes you pay for a film that is supposed to make you cry. One of the first genres that commercial cinema invented was “woman’s#up films”, typically love stories and domestic melodrama <\/span>. A sub-category of these were known as “weepies”: films intended to make you cry. For a prominent example see 1937’s Stella Dallas<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n
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#down. Do women really prefer different genres of film than men? One study suggests that they do an extent (i.e. they find a small difference in average liking scores for some genres), but that this gap isn't nearly as big as those very same men and women believed it to be <\/span><\/pre>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n
3. Large chunks of social media and reality TV<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some social media is full of delightful videos of puppies doing clever tricks, or people demonstrating outrageous skills, but quite a lot of the rest of it is full of people shouting at each other, screaming about things that are perceived to be horrible injustices, or rolling in the schadenfreude of watching people being ‘dunked on’. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Similarly, there is a whole genre of ‘reality TV’ in which producers place real contestants into close proximity with each other, make them tired and uncomfortable, and then stoke conflict until contestants are shouting, backstabbing each other, and scheming various forms of revenge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
4. Some forms of news & talk radio, etc<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In many places, you can tune into forms of media that cover current events with a very specific flavour. The exact topics covered will vary, but the themes tend to be the same:  Your country is under siege by groups who are ruining it, often immigrants or minorities. These groups are using up valuable resources, spreading crime, and otherwise making a nuisance of themselves. Sometimes powerful actors are trying to silence ‘us’ from speaking about such things, usually in ominous or threatening ways#up.<\/p>\n\n\n
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#down. This sort of content has been popular in many different countries, on and off, for at least a hundred years. See here<\/a> for a journalist who interviews people who are making a modern American version of it <\/pre>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n
Whatever you think of such content, it is clear that it can draw considerable audiences with an emotional current of fear and anger. They express fear that something authentic is being lost, and\/or that innocent people are suffering. They often seethe with anger at the people whom they present as being at fault for this. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Unlike horror movies, these emotions are not experienced as coming from safely imaginary sources. Instead, they are presented as coming from imminent and real threats. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There are many reasons that such content could be popular, but one is that it turns out that people quite like feeling angry – we will discuss why<\/a> in our next page on how emotions guide behaviour.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
Buying complex emotions<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Sometimes what we want isn’t positive or negative emotions, but rather to be taken on an up-and-down journey through a mix of them. Perhaps that sounds a little strange. You’ve probably never stood in a shop and asked: “Is there a big mix of emotions I can buy, please?”. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But consider video games:<\/p>\n\n\n
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(credit<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
Imagine playing a game in which you never fail. Every time your character gets to the edge of a little island (or whatever) you easily jump to the next one. It would be fun for a few minutes and then you would probably get bored of watching scenery scroll past. Imagine a game in which you always failed, and couldn’t make even the first jump. You’d get frustrated and give up on that one pretty soon too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you look at the games that succeed (in a very competitive industry!) they all give players a mix of success and failure – places where they get stuck, and places where they make breakthroughs. It seems that this mix of highs and lows helps make games more engaging#up.<\/p>\n\n\n
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#down. A similar thing happens watching sports teams. It may be more fun cheering for a team that consistently wins than one that consistently loses, but there biggest joy in all of sports comes from cheering for a perennial underdog that finally claims a grand prize.<\/pre>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n
Movies study<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
It isn’t just games. Jonah Berger and his colleagues <\/span> did a clever study looking at movies. They fed a large number of movie scripts into a computer program which split each script into a sequence of smaller segments, and scored each segment for how positive or negative the emotional tone of the words in it was. Then they used these scores to predict how successful the movie was according to meta review sites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They found that it didn’t matter much how positive or negative the movie was overall, or how big the gap was between the most positive and negative segments. What did seem to matter was whether the movie’s segments were moving regularly back and forth between positive and negative emotional tones. A 10% increase in emotional volatility (i.e., more regular ups and downs) was associated with a 1% increase in ratings. That might not sound like much, but a) it’s very difficult for movies to get good ratings, and b) their measure of shifting emotional tone was fairly crude, so it may not be fully seeing how big emotional swings were.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Berger and colleagues point out that there are probably natural limits on this. A film in which every scene had crazy highs followed by crazy lows would not only probably be confusing and unbelievable (e.g., “so this guy just won a million dollars and then his friend was killed and then he came back to life and they went to a party, but then a scary stalker was at the party…”), but most likely rather exhausting too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
White water rafting study<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Berger’s movie study gives interesting quantitative evidence that people like consuming complicated emotions. Next, we’ll look at a qualitative study to add the rich depths that only comes from observing people up close.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Eric Arnould and Linda Price <\/span> studied people who went on multi-day white water rafting trips. This involves steering inflatable boats down fast-flowing steeply dropping rivers full of big rocks. At night they camp in such primitive conditions that there isn’t even a toilet (you have to poop in a metal box and bury your own waste).<\/p>\n\n\n
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Whitewater rafting involves paddling inflatable rafts down plunges in rivers, bouncing past big rocks as the crashing water around you is pounded into a white froth. Fun! (credit<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n
As you can imagine, this is an experience rich in emotions, featuring moments of fear and excitement as your boat is thrown between large rocks and you are soaked in spray, but also discovery and interest as you bond with the other people on the trip, and feelings of awe and wonder at the nature that surrounds and permeates you. People tend to love these experiences, and arrive out of them feeling transformed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Interestingly, when the researchers tried to interview people about the different emotional elements of the trip, they didn’t want to try to ‘dissect’ the torrent of feelings they experienced – almost like being so analytic about it would sap away some of the magic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now you have the idea, here are 3 little wrinkles…<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Consuming emotions is not the most complicated idea in the world: A common reason to buy things is to receive the emotional experience they offer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Often it is that simple. But… here are three ways that consuming emotions can be more nuanced:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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  1. Consumption process emotions (primary vs. secondary emotion)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. Hedonic satiation<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. Affective forecasting<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
    That is a lot of jargon to fit into 3 small bullet points, but none of these ideas are as hard as they might sound. Let us make them clear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
    Consumption process emotions (primary vs. secondary emotion)<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
    So far we have talked about emotions that are delivered directly from consuming the thing itself: The taste of the brownie, the muscle relaxation from a massage, the horror movie shock when the monster leaps on screen (“Ew, the slime flying off its teeth!”). Psychologists call these direct emotions ‘primary’#up<\/p>\n\n\n
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    #down. Or sometimes 'integral affect'. Integral, because the feelings are integral to the consumption object - they are integrated, cannot be separated from it. Affect (pronounced \"AH-fect\") because this is a psychology term for emotions directed towards a specific thing. We will discuss it more in our next page<\/pre>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n
    But sometimes our enjoyment comes not directly from using the product, but from the entire process of consuming it<\/strong>. We might enjoy browsing in the shop. We might enjoy choosing between options. We might enjoy showing our new purchase to our friends at home. We might savour taking the thing out of its box for the first time. We might enjoy looking at its shiny new gleam. We will talk about this more on our next page as retail therapy<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
    These emotions are considered ‘secondary’ in the sense that they are not directly from the taste of the brownie or the driving of the car itself. Instead, they are built from events surrounding its acquisition and ownership.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
    If this sounds familiar, that may be because it is similar to “conceptual consumption<\/a>” <\/span>, an idea we discussed in Chapter 1#up. If you recall, conceptual consumption refers to a product’s core benefits that come from ideas rather than its physical use. A key source of these benefits is the activities surrounding acquiring and using a product. Those benefits do not have to be emotional but when they are, it is fair to describe them as consumption process emotions.<\/p>\n\n\n
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    #down. We realize that it probably feels like you last saw chapter 1 in the Cretacious period. Hopefully you find it worthwhile to refresh your memory and make some deep connections in your memory<\/pre>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n
    There are several reasons why conceptual consumption can be rewarding, and two of these may be particularly relevant to consumption emotions: anticipation, and goals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
    1. Anticipation<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
    Recall our old example about going on holiday? People, it turns out, are happier before they go than when they return <\/span>. This doesn’t make any sense if you imagine that the purpose of holidays is to make you happier, but it makes perfect sense when you think about the buying process for holidays.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
    You can have weeks, even months, before a holiday in which you can let your mind wander and dispel the boredom of your everyday life by daydreaming about the beach that you will soon be lying on, the ancient ruins you will soon be exploring, or the beautiful yet intriguing people you will meet, and the hours you can enjoy with them discussing model trains#up.<\/p>\n\n\n
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    #down. Or other things.
    Look, the world is a more wonderfully diverse place than we sometimes give it credit for being<\/pre>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n
    After the holiday you are back to life’s regular drudgery, with much less to look forward to (other than the prospect of reading another chapter in your CB book, you lucky thing).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
    This is true of many kinds of purchases beyond just holidays. When you buy a car you can dream about the perfect shimmer of its paint, how it will feel to drive wherever you want without your vehicle breaking, or the life it will let you lead. When you rent a new place to live you can look forward to what will happen in your new surroundings. Perhaps anticipating these things will give you complex emotions that mix excitement with even a little nervousness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
    2. Goals<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
    As we discussed in Chapter 2, goals are ideas of things we want to achieve that are held in our minds. Buying things is a common goal in all of our lives (assuming you live in a market economy).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
    Two things we learned in our goals chapter:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
    1. We feel a hit of pleasure when goals are attained,<\/a> and frustration when they are blocked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
    2. Being more strongly engaged with a goal<\/a> intensifies those reactions of pleasure and pain<\/p>\n\n\n\n
    If that sounds a bit theoretical, take the example of two people buying the same football shirt from the same stadium fan shop, one right after the other. The integral affect might be the same for both consumers (i.e., it looks nice when they wear it at the game, and then it hangs at the back of a cupboard for years when they get home). However, they might experience very different secondary emotions depending on the goals they held leading up to this purchase.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
    Perhaps it was an impulse buy for one of them, of a shirt for a team that they vaguely like, with a player’s name on the back whom they have only just heard of. Perhaps the other consumer was a die-hard fan of the team, who was making the trip of a lifetime from a faraway country to attend her first-ever game of her favourite team. She buys the shirt with the name of her idol player on the back (whose pictures have decorated her bedroom for years), and the shirt finally completes her collection of every shirt that this player has ever worn. The integral affect may be the same for both consumers, but the second one will likely be flooded with intensely positive secondary emotions. For her, the purchase releases a set of goals that she held with extremely high levels of engagement. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
    Hedonic satiation<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
    Are you ready for some bad news? The pleasure we get from a thing tends to reduce as we consume more of it. Your tenth mouthful of cake is not as enjoyable as your first. Your tenth time playing a video game tends not to be as fun as the first time you loaded it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
    Consumer researchers call this “satiation”, and have studied it quite a bit. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
    Why is it called satiation?<\/h5>
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    It possibly shouldn’t be. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
    Technically satiation is the satisfaction of appetites. If you take a hungry or thirsty male mouse they will work quite hard to get to food or water or a female mouse who is in estrus (i.e., the hormone phase in which she can make baby mice). Once that furry fella has been able to eat, drink, and\/or mate, his drive to pursue these goals will be ‘satiated’, and he may temporarily lose all interest in them. We will talk about satiation more in our chapter on automaticity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
    But psychology has another term with perhaps an even closer meaning: ‘habituation’. If you put a new type of object into a mouse’s cage they will be fearful and\/or curious about it until they habituate to it – essentially get used to it and start seeing it as normal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
    You can see the analogy that the consumer researchers were trying to make when they called their phenomenon ‘satiation’. While ‘habituation’ is probably a little more accurate, nobody seems to think it is worth the confusion of switching now that so much has already been written about it, and so here we are.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
    Why would this happen?<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
    The short answer is that our brains get a bit bored when they think they have figured something out, and stop paying it as much attention.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
    That’s a bit glib for me. What’s the fuller explanation?<\/h5>
    \n
    The long answer is that our brains are essentially prediction machines, constantly trying to generate a good-enough understanding of what will happen next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
    Why only ‘good enough’? Because predicting is hard work! It is motivated to put the effort in when it is feeling anxious and uncertain about something. But that changes once it decides that it has a good enough idea of what is happening. When that happens it starts to become a lot more economical with its efforts and stops working nearly so hard at processing everything (some people call this ‘efficient’ others ‘lazy’, take your pick).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
    What this means for satiation is that your first bite of a chocolate bar makes your brain extra happy, partly because it correctly predicted the pleasant taste, but also partly because it now gets to pay close attention to rediscovering the many nice complexities of the taste experience that it had forgotten (the bitter sugariness, the melting texture, etc). By the time you take your last bite of this bar, however, your brain has usually decided that its understanding of the incoming taste experience is more than good enough. It therefore processes the taste in a much more cursory way (“Oh this again. Sugar, bitter, melting, blah blah blah, I know all that. What next?”). The taste becomes more boring, and your enjoyment dies down a little.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
    “Oh come on, it’s just your tastebuds getting used to a flavour, right”<\/h5>
    \n
    That probably happens to some extent, but a) it isn’t only food that people’s enjoyment satiates on, and b) it turns out that satiation happens even when people are only looking at pictures of similar-tasting foods in order to make judgments or ratings about them <\/span>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
    We did warn you that people are weird, right?<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
    Are we stuck with satiation?<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
    It seems sad that the pleasure we would get from things would fade, but consumer psychologists have identified many tricks for slowing this process down so that we can enjoy things for longer. For your future consumption pleasure, we present a partial list of things that have been found to work at least somewhat. As you read it, notice the general pattern: they are all about trying to disrupt your brain’s tendency to grow satisfied that it has understood the experience well enough, by trying to get it to reconsider the experience in slightly different ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
      \n
    • Have people focus on the lower-level features of a product (such as the different flavours of jelly beans they are trying) rather than the overall category of jellybeans as a food type <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
    • Get people to mentally separate the positive from the negative emotions that they experience <\/span> to create more emotionally detailed processing <\/li>\n\n\n\n
    • Making them consume the experience more slowly than they would normally choose to, with more breaks <\/span>.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    • Having them think about the variety of related items that they have consumed in the past <\/span><\/li>\n\n\n\n
    • Have them taste foods that are consistent with an identity that you have mentally activated in them <\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
      But don’t we come to like things over time as we experience them?<\/h5>
      \n
      Confusingly, this can happen too. Sometimes you start off hating a food or a song until you’ve eaten or listened to it a number of times and then it ‘grows’ on you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
      If something has complexities to it, then it can take you some time to begin to unravel those enough to understand and enjoy them. Sometimes you can’t even enjoy it at all until you have understood it enough. There is an old paper showing this with advertising – that people get bored of simple ones quickly, and satiate more slowly on complex ones <\/span>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
      There is also an effect that we will talk about in our chapter on communications whereby people tend to like things that feel familiar. This reflects feelings of comfort with a thing, however, and is less about how long it stays enjoyable to engage with.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
      Affective forecasting<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
      When we buy things for the way they will make us feel we are generally making that purchase based on our own internal projection for how consuming it will make us feel. If that forecast is accurate then all is well and we get what we paid for. If not then we may be disappointed. So how good are we at making these forecasts?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
      It turns out that we have a fairly consistent bias: We tend to assume that the pleasure (or pain) will be stronger and last longer than it really will <\/span>. It seems that we tend to overly focus on a few emotionally loaded aspects of our expectations when making our predictions, whereas consumption experiences are usually more complicated and meshed into our ongoing life. Their impact is generally more diluted than we expect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
      These mistakes can matter to us as consumers, but also to firms. It seems that we evaluate products worse when we misforecast how they will make us feel in a negative direction (i.e., we are less happy or more sad than we thought we would be), but we don’t tend to evaluate them as better when we misforecast in a positive direction (i.e., they make us happier than we thought they would). This seems to be because we notice the negative misforecasts more, and spend more time mentally elaborationg on what went wrong <\/span>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
      Interestingly not everyone is equally prone to misforecasting. People with greater emotional intelligence (so-called “EQ”) seem to be better at avoiding these forecasting errors. So is your EQ good enough that you will help avoid this mistake? The research suggests that you probably don’t know! This greater accuracy only showed up when EQ was measured by people’s actual performance at correctly judging emotions and emotional situations. When researchers asked for people’s perception of their own emotionally intelligent these scores didn’t predict better forecasts <\/span>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
      Tell me more about consumption emotions, I am fascinated<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
      Marsha Richins <\/span> has written a lovely chapter about consumption emotions that is full of nice examples and further layers of their subtleties. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
      Example 1: She points out that most of the things we buy are experienced as pretty mundane and boring, but that some ‘extraordinary’ items like houses and cars nearly always cause strong emotions when we purchase them. Other items occupy a middle ground which can change depending on the person or the context. For instance, the same shirt that might be boring to most of us could be far more exciting to a fan of fashion, or even to a person who is considering wearing it on a big first date.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
       Example 2: While consumption emotions typically fade fairly quickly, they can be long-lasting when we acquire things with deep personal meaning; perhaps a memento of someone we miss, or a tattoo commemorating a special time in our life, etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
      Review<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
      {pods_post_review}<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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      <\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n
      <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
      Sometimes the thing you are buying is a feeling… or a mix of feelings<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3627,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"chapter":[17],"exclude_from_index":[16],"class_list":["post-2447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","chapter-5-emotions","exclude_from_index-include"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2447","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2447"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2447\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3969,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2447\/revisions\/3969"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2447"},{"taxonomy":"chapter","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/chapter?post=2447"},{"taxonomy":"exclude_from_index","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/illuminated-text.com\/cb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/exclude_from_index?post=2447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}