Content area
Full text
Introduction
In The Consumer Society , Baudrillard (1970), writes that the utilitarian nature of consumption has steadily morphed into an emotion-and symbol-producing activity, where the object of consumption is the key to an "economy of experience" (Pine and Gilmore, 1999). In recent years, there has been a growing interest in "experiential" consumption among academic and business communities. According to some authors (Addis and Holbrook, 2001; Carù and Cova, 2003), this keen interest might well be explained by the emergence of a new type of consumer - one who is more demanding, eager for innovation and always looking for a unique experience. Studies support the idea that customer satisfaction, through a pleasant consumer experience, positively impacts the customer's judgement (Homburg et al. , 2006; Lee et al. , 2008), enabling the company to increase its profitability and market share (Lai et al. , 2009).
Despite its mass appeal, the concept of experience remains a rather unexplored field. In fact, most studies on experience analyze it from the perspective of satisfaction or the emotions and feelings derived directly from the act of consumption (Ladwein, 2002). Such an approach seems rather reductive when one considers that, today, many consumption activities do not fall in line with traditional definitions of experience. To better understand the consumer experience, one should study it in its entirety, from a perspective that promotes the discovery of new dimensions.
Authors interested in the consumption experience, have, for the most part, been focussed on understanding the perceived expressions or advantages - emotional, sensorial or symbolic. If we know that these experiential consequences or advantages are themselves strongly attributed to the manner in which the consumer captures the experience (Ladwein, 2002), it may also be interesting to study the mechanisms and ways that consumers access the consumption experience.
The objective of this study is twofold: to identify the dimensions associated with the entire consumer experience and to outline the different modes of access and appropriation of this experience. In this sense, we have chosen to explore the experiential universe of coffee consumption by analyzing the narratives of 41 Canadian consumers of Tim Hortons'[1] coffee. Very few studies conducted in the area of food have been really interested in applying the concept of experience to products of...