Consumption experience, customer value, and subjective personal introspection: An illustrative photographic essay

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. (c) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.