Читать книгу Digital Marketing - Annmarie Hanlon - Страница 54

The Greek goddess Hedone represented pleasure and enjoyment and is the origin of the word hedonism. Describing consumption as hedonic indicates that it provides delight. Hedonic consumption is largely credited with having been placed on the marketing research agenda by Elizabeth Hirschman and Morris Holbrook:

Hedonic consumption designates those facets of consumer behavior that relate to the multi-sensory, fantasy, and emotive aspects of one's experience with products. (Hirschman and Holbrook, 1982, p. 92)

A hedonic consumer is thus a consumer who gains happiness from acquisition!

Utilitarian benefits have been described as the functional, instrumental and practical attributes of the item (Chitturi et al., 2008).

For more on hedonic and utilitarian consumption see: ‘Pleasure principles: A review of research on hedonic consumption’ by Joseph Alba and Elanor Williams in the Journal of Consumer Psychology (Alba and Williams, 2013).

Michel Pham discussed consumer psychology, mainly concerning the way the research has become detached from practice. He illustrated the scope of consumer behaviour as being framed between consumer experience and consumer learning, which is shown in Figure 2.1.

If we apply this in a digital context we might consider an online-only product, such as online storage space. We are in an environment where we write reports, create presentations, store images and collect content. All these online documents require storage. You could store your documents on a PC, but the challenge is that you may use different PCs or laptops – at home, at the university and in libraries. And what happens if your main laptop breaks or gets stolen? That would mean your work was lost too.

Thinking about the potential for things to go wrong, it is easier to rent some space in the cloud.

The concept of ‘the cloud’ means we can access our materials at any time from a remote or virtual computer, which enables ubiquitous computing (see Key Term, p. 4).

Figure 2.1 The scope of consumer behaviour

Source: Pham, 2013, p. 414

Cloud storage options have expanded in recent years. Many people started with a small amount of space in Dropbox that they rent with a free account. This is free-renting.

Dropbox's aim was that as your storage needs increase, because you might hoard documents, rather than sorting out and deleting older copies, you will need to upgrade to a paid-for plan. In this example, you never own the product, you simply rent, paying either a monthly or annual rental charge.

This is an example of utilitarian consumption. You may not feel delighted subscribing to Dropbox, but it is useful for online storage. Dropbox is trying to transform this into a hedonic purchase with the idea of ‘gifting’ storage to a friend. I don't know about your friends, but mine would consider it odd if I gifted them online storage space!

There are alternatives to cloud storage. You could use external hard drives or USB sticks. These could present the same issues as a hard drive. The Macbook or laptop could freeze, may need to be completely re-set (return to factory settings) and I could still lose the data.