4 MAGIC MOMENTS – DATA ANALYSIS AND FINDINGS
4.6 Concluding Remarks
This chapter has answered the following research questions: What are the main characteristics of experiences, and what are the main factors that trigger experiential value?
I have identified and explained the basis for the seven distinct triggers of experiential value.
The findings expand and enrich current literature and add to the design principles of experiences. They support and confirm some of the previously suggested factors given as design principles to create experiences (Pine and Gilmore 1999) and as criteria for Flow (Csikszentmihalyi 1990), but they furthermore emphasize several new factors whose importance and role have been less noted in these contexts. The findings also provide an overview of some essential general characteristics of experience offerings, such as the co-creation of experiential value. The concept of a subjective membrane is conceptualized and discussed as a contribution to capture and account for the effect of individual differences in the co-creation process. The findings are summed up and presented in a number of propositions relating to the elements discussed. Based on this, an underlying causal logic for how the elements are related and why is developed. Finally, the result is visualized through the Star Experience Model, depicting the overall context and the various elements involved in the co-creation of experiential value, including both a consumer and a provider perspective.
The findings have contributed to the development of a more comprehensive and theoretically and empirically based insight into experiences as economic offerings.
The experience economy literature has gradually arrived at a shared understanding of what experiences is a mental phenomenon, notwithstanding that they simultaneously, in a business setting, operate as a resource for economic value generating. This has been illustrated, underlined and discussed in many ways throughout this study. However, so far in the experience economy discourse, psychological approaches have to a very limited degree been referred to, with a few exceptions (Jantzen 2013; Boswijk et al. 2012). As I mentioned earlier, Pine and Gilmore (1999) described experiences as staged from the management side and they have been criticized for not placing enough emphasis on the individual and the psychological processes involved.
The field of Consumer Behavior has had an interest in understanding the consumption of experiences in relation to a number of leisure activities and does indeed include psychological perspectives and regularly relates to such psychologically based concepts as flow, emotions, subjective perceptions, etc. (Unger and Kernan 1983; Arnould and Price 1993; Celsi, Rose, and Leigh 1993; Thompson, Locander, and Pollio 1989; Addis and Holbrook 2001).
Consumer behavior has investigated experiential consumption, but it has been conducted mainly through ethnographic studies in specific types of contexts. This has brought forth interesting findings, but it was my assessment that the time was ripe for a search for commonalities across contexts, rather than continuing the quest for more knowledge in even more marginalized contexts. Furthermore, consumer behavior studies rarely relate their findings to a managerial perspective (which in my opinion is unfortunate, because if they did, the experience economy discourse surely could have gained considerably more from many of
these interesting studies). Nevertheless, experiences, as economic offerings, are set in specific locations and are evoked through facilities and activities designed, constructed and operated with the help of managerial knowhow and decision-making. Experience offerings are constructed and staged means to give access to a specific content. This may be for commercial or non-profit purposes or staged by a government for the public good. But in neither case are they coincidental happenings – they are designed products. It follows that if we want to have any firm understanding of experiential value and experience as offerings, there is really no way around relating to both managerial and psychological approaches. This study provides a deliberate attempt to do just that, to combine both psychological and managerial perspectives in developing a theory for the process and elements that contribute to value creation in experience offerings. Moreover, the study was constructed with sampling and theorizing across a broad range of multiple contexts to provide a solid and broad base for the findings and to be able to further the generalization of the findings.
A more generalized toolbox – of design principles for how to create experience offerings – with knowledge of triggers that create experiences, should be useful for practitioners as well.
For practitioners it would be valuable to be able to understand, transfer and compare between the similar and the dissimilar. To know the underlying principles will make it easier to borrow and develop good value generating elements from one context to the other. Many experience providers could use a far wider range of tools and techniques if they just looked outside their traditional boundaries. In the context of experiences as economic offerings, it is a conscious effort and endeavor to make accessible and present stimuli for a commercial purpose – a deliberate intention by a provider to optimize stimuli in the outer world through objects, activities and facilities to provide an experience to a consumer. The provider’s aim is to optimize the interaction between the business entity and the customer by giving access to and staging an offering to optimize the chances of a manifestation of a worthwhile experience in the consumer. The findings presented in this chapter regarding principles of how to design and develop offerings that maximize the chances of evoking experiential value should be of direct relevance and use to practitioners as well.