Consumers’ minimum time investments in meaningful consumption

Erin Percival Carter (), Lawrence E. Williams () and Nicholas Light ()
Additional contact information
Erin Percival Carter: University of Maine
Lawrence E. Williams: University of Colorado Boulder
Nicholas Light: University of Oregon

Marketing Letters, 2024, vol. 35, issue 4, No 4, 573 pages

Abstract: Abstract Consumer well-being involves not only the pursuit of pleasure, but also the pursuit of meaning. However, little is known about how people perceive the costs and benefits of meaning- versus pleasure-oriented experiences. We find that compared to pleasure-oriented experiences, people expect meaning-oriented experiences to be more satisfying after meeting a minimum time investment (i.e., the perceived minimum amount of time needed to derive benefits from consumption; study 1). As a consequence, people choose to prolong their exposure to meaningful (vs. pleasurable) experiences following interruptions (study 2). We discuss the implications of minimum time investments for firms’ relationships with consumers and marketing communication design (web appendix).

Keywords: Happiness; Well-being; Eudaimonia; Hedonics; Lay-theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11002-023-09709-z Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:mktlet:v:35:y:2024:i:4:d:10.1007_s11002-023-09709-z

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... etailsPage=societies

DOI: 10.1007/s11002-023-09709-z

Access Statistics for this article

Marketing Letters is currently edited by Joel Steckel and Peter Golder

More articles in Marketing Letters from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().