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Paying for experiences may be more rewarding than material purchases

New research shows that people may be likely to enjoy paying for experiential purchases more than material purchases before and after the purchase.

Researchers at Cornell University and the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco studied three groups of participants who were making either material product or experiential purchases, such as concert tickets or a vacation. They found that people tended to enjoy the anticipation building up to the experience, and the positive feelings lasted longer than for material purchases.

“With experiential purchases, the benefits, even though they’re fleeting and not tangible, they kind of stay with you,” Amit Kumar, PhD candidate, Cornell University and one of the researchers, said in an interview with Psychiatric Annals. “You look forward to them and get benefits before you actually consume them, and then you look back on them fondly.”

One group of Cornell students (n=97) was asked to think about an upcoming experiential or material purchase, each similar in cost, and share information about their state of mind before the purchase. The participants anticipating an experiential purchase reported more pleasant feelings while waiting than those anticipating a material purchase, such as clothing or a new laptop computer.

In a second study group of adults (n=2,266), participants considering a future purchase consistently reported higher scores on excitement, pleasantness and happiness associated with an experiential purchase vs. those who were anticipating a material purchase.

The third study group was designed to determine if the anticipation of material or experiential purchases was likely to influence behavior. It was conducted by collecting newspaper reports (n=149) about rioting and other violent behavior caused by people standing in line waiting to make a material or an experiential purchase.

“It turned out that those stories [which included violence] were less likely to happen when they were about people waiting for experiential purchases,” Kumar said. “We did expect to find that, but we weren’t sure if it would show up in that context or not.”

People may be getting less satisfaction from material purchases, according to Kumar.

“What they don’t always realize is that they quickly adapt to those material possessions,” he said, while with experiences, “you tell stories about them, you talk about them with other people, and that’s kind of how people continue to derive a more enduring satisfaction from experiential purchases whereas the joy that they get from their material goods is kind of short lived.”

Kumar said the work has societal implications.

“I think there are interesting discussions to be had about whether communities and governments should try to support … to facilitate experiential consumption, so there are good reasons for why there should be public funding for the arts, maintaining performance halls or public parks or beaches,” he said. “I think it’s a good idea in general for people to shift some of their consumption away from material goods toward experiences, so if there are ways to help them do that, that’s probably going to make for a happier population.” – by Shirley Pulawski

Disclosure: The authors reported no financial disclosures.