Please join us for Professor Michel Tuan Pham's Distinguished Seminar entitled 'The Psychology of Consumer Fun'. Please email mktoffice@wbs.ac.uk to register.
Abstract:
The experience of fun plays a major role in the consumer society. Drawing on a grounded theory approach, we advance a psychological theory of consumer fun. Through an integration of in-depth interviews, narrative analyses, controlled experiments, structural equation modeling, and a photo-ethnography, our multimethod investigation makes four main contributions. First, we show that the experience of fun rests on the combination of two psychological pillars: hedonic engagement and a sense of liberation. Fun is an experience of liberating engagement—a temporary release from psychological restriction via a hedonically engaging activity. Second, we identify four situational facilitators—novelty, social connectedness, spontaneity, and spatial/temporal boundedness—that promote the experience of fun through their effects on hedonic engagement and the sense of liberation. Third, we show that although the psychology of fun is not consumption specific, there is an intimate connection between fun and consumption. Finally, we clarify the relation and distinction between fun and happiness. We discuss implications for our understanding of consumption experiences, business practices related to the engineering of fun, and consumers’ own pursuits of fun and happiness.
Professor Michel Tuan Pham is the Kravis Professor of Business in Marketing at Columbia Business School, which he joined in 1994. He is the Research Director of the Center for Global Brand Leadership and Co-Director of Columbia’s Brand Leadership program for executives. He is a Fellow and past President of the Society for Consumer Psychology. His research is widely cited and has resulted in more than 50 publications in leading academic journals both in the U.S. and in Europe. He has published in outlets such as Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Psychological Science, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and Journal of Consumer Psychology. One of his recent papers (Smartphone as a Pacifying Technology) was awarded the best JCR paper (2023). He serves or has served on the Editorial Boards of Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, International Journal of Research in Marketing, and Recherche et Applications en Marketing. He is a past Area Editor of the popular research dialogue section of the Journal of Consumer Psychology and a current Issue Editor of the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research.