تجربه مصرف، ارزش مشتری، و درون گرایی شخصی ذهنی : مقاله عکاسی گویا

This study illustrates the applicability of subjective personal introspection via a photographic essay that draws on written memoirs as a path to insights concerning the role of customer value in the consumption experience. Extending earlier work in this direction, the present research explores a set of sixty-year-old Kodachrome slides taken by the author's grandfather to develop interpretations bolstered and corroborated by the narrative accounts in this late gentleman's logbook. Arguably, this approach taps aspects of the Three Fs (fantasies, feelings, and fun) as they contribute to customer value in ways not accessible to methods of modeling the consumer as a rational economic decision maker nor to advanced techniques for studying the consumption experience by means of laboratory experiments, quantitative surveys, and multivariate statistics.

Back in October 1964, a group of fearless marketing scholars from a number of notable schools – including Ray Bauer (Harvard), Paul Green (Wharton), Al Kuehn (Carnegie), Sid Levy (Northwestern), Bill Massy (Stanford), Charles Ramond (Columbia), Gary Steiner (Chicago), and Bill Wells (Rutgers) – convened briefly at Stanford University to initiate the development of what would ultimately become the field of consumer research via essays later published as a book edited by Newman (1966) and entitled On Knowing the Consumer. In its early days, this fledgling discipline struggled for academic respectability while its key contributors strived to attain the maximum degree of scientific rigor (e.g., Howard and Sheth, 1969 and Nicosia, 1966). Toward this end, a consensus evolved to embrace a view of the consumer as a rational economic decision maker who searched for, attended to, and processed information about brand attributes in an effort to achieve maximally satisfying purchase choices (e.g., Bettman, 1979). Deeply indebted to the work of Nobel laureate Herbert Simon and his colleagues at Carnegie (e.g., Simon, 1957), this view regarded the consumer as a sort of computer — that is, as a machine for cranking out bounded-rational brand choices aimed at the maximization of utility subject to various imperfections imposed by limitations in cognitive capacity (selective attention, distorted perceptions, restricted memory, and so forth).

The work reported here represents a shameless attempt to “lead by example” in the advocacy of a research style that delves into areas of the consumption experience where most have “feared to tread.” Those who righteously consider themselves to be on the side of the angels in eschewing methods drawn from subjective personal introspection, as bolstered by photographs or written memoirs, might pause to lament the potential loss of insights – especially those pertaining to the Three Fs (fantasies, feelings, and fun) – that results from the principled neglect of autoethnographic materials. In the particular case illustrated here, we find hitherto untapped aspects of customer value waiting to emerge from the vantage point of a sixty-year gap in time. We find that these aspects of value carry an emotional charge that belies their historical distance. And we sympathetically recreate the context of consumption in which they still resonate today. Those doubting the efficacy of this and related approaches might take a trip up the stairs to the attic or down the steps to the basement in search of old family photographs or other ancient mementos. Spend a day or two pouring over these memorabilia. Reflect deeply on the recollections, associations, feelings, thoughts, and other insights that they arouse. Relax and compose an impressionistic narrative account of these ruminations. And perhaps, thereby, become the author of a new and fascinating photographic essay that contributes to our understanding of customer value or some other facet of the consumption experience.