Pleasure and Enjoyment in the Consumption Experience: The Case of ICT-Based Services

Pleasure as felt during a consumption experience can range (Eccles et al., 2006) from a reflex response of the senses to an optimal state of contentment called “flow” (enjoyment). Some studies have revealed the existence of a kind of sub-category of the flow experience, one based on a less total and more ephemeral type of enjoyment, the so-called “small victories”. Consequently, we consider in this research three modulations of pleasure/enjoyment: excitation, small victories and flow. In experiential marketing approaches, it would seem that the consumer is supposed to gain an immediate access to the experience. However, the access to experience is neither obvious nor systematic and requires competencies that the consumer does not necessarily possess. Two models are on offer as ways of understanding the process for accessing experience: the “flow model” by Csikszentmihalyi (1997) that describes the ways of accessing a flow experience; and the “appropriation model” that Carù and Cova (2006) developed to describe ways of accessing a pleasurable/enjoyable consumption experience. The flow model emphasizes two components of the access to experience: control and concentration. The appropriation model describes three operations in order to access the experience: nesting, investigating, stamping. These appropriation operations are as it follows: • Nesting: the individual feels at home after isolating part of the experience, being the aspect with which the person is already familiar due to his/her accumulated experience and existing foothold; • Investigating (Exploration): starting from the nest that has been built up in this fashion, the individual will try to explore and identify new products or activities so as to develop certain points of anchorage and control (signposts); • Stamping: a person will attribute a specific meaning to an experience or a part thereof. This meaning will not be the one that is commonly ascribed to the experience but instead a personal one, rooted in the individual’s own referents, history, etc. The overall aim of our research is to compare the flow model and the appropriation model and analyze how their access operations impact on the three pleasure/enjoyment modulations. Method We choose to concentrate on virtual or online experiences (achieved through Internet) and especially on experiences lived with three types of ICT-related services (Siddiqui and Turley, 2006): Social Interaction Directed websites (the photo-blog Wanadoo Photo and the personal pages system MyMSN); Information Rich website (Google Earth); Service Oriented websites (MSN Shopping). Consumers were asked to freely browse one the service websites chosen by them for a period of around 40 minutes. The study was based on a sample of novice, average and expert Internet users, geographically split between large and medium-sized cities. The sample was comprised of 60 subjects from France and Italy. We used an approach based on retrospective introspection: subjects were required to write a narrative report of her/his experience, without any particular frame to follow. Each report was 1 to 2 pages long. Each narrative report drafted by a subject was coupled with an ethnographic type of description drafted by the researcher who observed the Internet navigation. Analysis covered the 55 narratives/observations deemed valid. The analysis and interpretation of the introspective narratives’ contents involved both an intra-textual and an inter-textual approach. Analysis focused on the temporal structure of the reports. A quantitative data processing based on the frequency of each component/operation/modulation’s appearance was applied to each narrative/observation. As additional analysis, a statistical processing of all data was then executed in order to verify the causal relations between the variables considered and the impact of the level of expertise of the subjects and the type of website on the subjects’ behaviour.