Selling Pain to the Saturated Self

Abstract

How can we comprehend people who pay for an experience marketed as painful? On one hand, consumers spend billions of dollars every year to alleviate different kinds of pain. On the other hand, millions of individuals participate in extremely painful leisure pursuits. In trying to understand this conundrum, we ethnographically study a popular adventure challenge where participants subject themselves to electric shocks, fire, and freezing water. Through sensory intensification, pain brings the body into sharp focus, allowing individuals to rediscover their corporeality. In addition, painful extraordinary experiences operate as regenerative escapes from the self. By flooding the consciousness with gnawing unpleasantness, pain provides a temporary relief from the burdens of self-awareness. Finally, when leaving marks and wounds, pain helps consumers create the story of a fulfilled life. In a context of decreased physicality, market operators play a major role in selling pain to the saturated selves of knowledge workers, who use pain as a way to simultaneously escape reflexivity and craft their life narrative.

How Brands Acquire Cultural Meaning

“…With the development of smart technologies that are increasingly embedded in consumer's daily lives, branded objects – or, more appropriately, systems of branded smart objects – amplify their potential to extend and, interestingly, constrain the self (Hoffman, Novak, Fischer, & Kozinets, ). Widespread digitalization of products and their easy dissemination through social media fundamentally change how people construct and reveal their sense of self online (Belk, ) and offline (Scott, Cayla, & Cova, ).…”

Consumer spirituality

“…Together, the two articles add a novel, embodied perspective to research on consumer spiritualty. Previous research has shown that painful bodies can be a powerful vehicle to slow down consumers' minds (Husemann & Eckhardt, 2018) as well as to enable consumers to escape the self and help create the story of a fulfilled life (Scott, Cayla, & Cova, 2017). These two articles add that, via the body or bodily sensations such as pain, consumers can actualise a spiritual experience.…”

Experiencing Nature through Nordic Restrictions and Freedom

“…Since then, ethnography has been increasingly used in studying everyday cultural consumption (Arnould and Wallendorf 1994;Thompson 2005, Kozinets 2010). It is widely used in consumer culture theory studies, for example in understanding subcultures in the context of Harley Davidson motorcycle fans (Schouten and McAlexander 1995), experiential servicescapes in the context of whitewater rafting (Arnould and Price 1993), sociocultural branding in the context of the American Girl brand (Diamond et al 2009), and extraordinary experiences and pain in the context of the Tough Mudder adventure challenge (Scott et al 2017), to name a few. The method is especially useful for the present study because of ethnography's focus on observing consumers in their everyday life while they are carrying out their practices (Reckwitz 2002).…”