The Experience of Consumer Choice

Abstract

Subjective consumer experience has important implications for marketing practice. In particular, consumer choice is marked by conflict between higher- and lower-valued items, changes in temporal preference and intra-consumer pressures to conform to impulsive versus self-controlled motives for action. The phenomenology of consumer choice involves conflict between alternative courses of action as consumers respond to the situational influences on their behaviour by interpreting them subjectively. In this process, consumers create subjective valuations of the outcomes of their past behaviour and the possibilities offered by the current consumer behaviour settings they face.

Of course, you don’t usually feel as if you’re bargaining with yourself. You make a decision with all things considered, and later you make another decision where one of the things considered is the former decision, and so on.

—George Ainslie (2001, p. 106)