We examine consumer expectations about how specialty versus conventional food products affect well-being and how small, artisan producers can use that information to design better customer experiences. Drawing on recent work examining the costs and benefits of pleasure- and meaning-based consumption, we investigate whether consumer expectations that specialty products are more meaningful lead to increased desire for additional product information. We selectively sampled from the target market of interest: high-involvement consumers who regularly consume a food (cheese) in both more typical and specialty forms. The authors manipulate product type (typical versus special) within participant and measure differences in expected pleasure and meaning as well as a variety of behaviors related to and preference for additional product information. We find that these high-involvement consumers expect special food products to provide both more meaningful (hypothesized) and more pleasurable consumption experiences (not hypothesized) than typical food products. Consistent with our theory, consumer use of, search for, and preference for additional product information was greater for special products. A causal mediation analysis revealed that expectations of meaning mediate the relationship between product type and utility of product information, an effect which persists controlling for the unexpected difference in expected pleasure.
With the rise of the sharing economy, more consumers than ever are thinking about products not in terms of ownership, but in terms of access necessary to facilitate experiences. In this paper, we build on prior literature, which distinguished product from experiential satisfaction to explore the role that knowledge of a prior user plays in shaping these two types of satisfaction in access‐based consumption experiences. Across three studies, we demonstrate that product and experiential satisfaction can be affected differently when consumers are provided with information about previous users of products. We find that information about the previous user of a product consistently negatively impacts product satisfaction. However, we find that when the previous user has positive and experientially relevant traits, experiential satisfaction is increased. When the information about the previous user is negative or experientially irrelevant, experiential satisfaction is decreased. In cases in which we find a positive effect of prior user information on experiential satisfaction, we find it is mediated by transfer of the previous user's traits and that the effectiveness of this mechanism depends on the relevance of traits and the stability of the self‐concept of the consumer.
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