Mind, Heart, and Body: Everyday Consumption Experiences and Consumer Happiness

Abstract

We explore how daily experiences, evoked by ordinary, everyday consumption activities, contribute to happiness and quality of life. Based on works in philosophy (Dewey, 1922; 1925) and cognitive science (Pinker, 1997), Brakus, Schmitt, and Zarantonello (2009) identified four dimensions of experience: sensory, affective, intellectual, and behavioral. Sensory experience refers to the stimulation of the senses. Affective experience includes moods and emotions. Intellectual experience includes analytical as well as imaginative thinking. Finally, behavioral experience includes experiences resulting from an action-oriented interaction with the environment. All four types of experiences may be evoked during consumption activities that are part of our daily lives—for example when we eat, exercise, or consume entertainment.We think that the experience and the happiness constructs are tied conceptually. Both are concerned with elements that can transcend everyday life. Importantly, the four experience dimensions seem to map closely the three happiness dimensions: pleasure (Kahneman, Diener, and Schwarz, 1999), meaning (Waterman, 1993), and engagement (Peterson, Park, and Seligman, 2005). Specifically, evoked sensory-affective as well as behavioral (bodily) experiences may contribute to “pleasure;” evoked intellectual experiences may contribute to “meaning;” and evoked behavioral experiences may contribute to “engagement,” which occurs when individuals are focused on an activity. Thus, overall, we predict that experience is an important contributor to happiness-as-state in everyday life. We also expect that when consumers are directly engaged in a consumption that evokes specific experience, their judgments of their subjective state of happiness at that moment will be largely independent of their chronic orientation to happiness (Peterson, Park, and Seligman, 2005).To understand the relationship between everyday consumption and the perceived happiness, we conducted a diary study with consumers. We asked the respondents to keep the diary for a week and they addressed the same set of questions every day. First, we asked them to report the “level of activity” by stating how much they engaged in each of the following activities: “eating or preparing food,” “entertaining yourself,” “engaging in physical activities,” “grooming and dressing,” and “shopping” (from 1 = “very little” to 7 = “very much”). Second, we asked how much each of the five activities stimulated a specific experience, using a similar scale (“level of experience”). Third, we asked consumers to provide descriptions of how each of the activities that they did stimulated a specific experience. Lastly, the respondents had to complete a nine-item scale on happiness, adapted from Peterson, Park, and Seligman (2005), that captured the three dimensions of happiness-as-state and a four-item scale on life quality adapted from Diener et al. (1985). Before they started keeping the diary, respondents also responded to Peterson, Park, and Seligman’s original chronic orientation-to-happiness scale. To make sure that the respondents addressed all the types of experiences, we randomly divided the sample into four groups and asked the respondents in each group to focus either on sensory or affective or intellectual or behavioral (bodily) experiences. The respondents (n = 163) were master-level students at a major European business school.First, we examined the relations between consumption activities and experiences by estimating a series of regressions. The results show that all consumption activities can evoke specific experiences. We then investigated the relations between the specific types of experience and the states of happiness. The “level of experience” was the independent variable this time and the dependent variables were the dimensions of happiness states. The results show that pleasure is a consequence of the evoked affective and behavioral (bodily) experiences. Sensory and intellectual (imaginative) experiences have a positive and significant effect as well, but weaker. Engagement results especially from behavioral (bodily) experiences. Consumers seem to find behavioral experiences and intellectual (imaginative) experiences especially meaningful. Respondent’s chronic orientation to happiness does not seem to affect or moderate these results. Finally, the results show that each happiness dimension has a positive and significant effect on the perceived life quality. However, pleasure seems to be its strongest predictor. Qualitative diary data corroborate these findings.Our results indicate that individuals derive happiness from mundane consumption episodes, but what really leads to happiness is the nature of the evoked experience during those episodes, rather than an enduring trait such as orientation-to-happiness. It appears that the experience construct is central to our understanding of happiness, at least when it comes to happiness as a consequence of ordinary rather than of extraordinary events.