Critically evaluating the marketisation of fun through a socio-cultural lens of consumer experience

Abstract

Ubiquitous but elusive, fun flows through the fabric of contemporary consumer experiences, enticing marketers to weave the societal pursuit of fun throughout customer journeys. However, despite fun’s omnipresence, scholarly understandings of the construct are limited. Marketing and consumer research struggles to provide a definitional consensus, let alone comprehension of fun’s conceptual elements and marketers’ abilities to leverage them. Driven by the lack of theoretical understanding of the construct of fun and the keen interest of practitioners, this study has two objectives. First, to examine consumers’ lived meanings of fun and the ways in which these are constructed, interpreted, and shared. Second, to understand how the concept of fun is used by marketers in pursuit of marketing objectives and whether the perspectives of two sides are aligned. Underpinned by an interpretive methodology with the hermeneutic phenomenological lens, the empirical element of this study entails in-depth interviews with consumersand marketing professionals representing the brands that adopt the concept of fun in their promotional activities. The findings from consumer interviews reveal two layers of insight. In experienced fun, consumers’ meaning making revolves around positive affective states, liberated self, social connectedness and normality transgression. From a wider perspective of fun as a part of consumers’ lives, self is constrained, social influence is evident and fun meanings are shaped by often restrictive social norms. The findings from marketers’ sample signal that while such aspects of consumer fun as positive affective states, social connectedness and going beyond normality are acknowledged, the dynamics of self-liberation and self-constraint, as well as the tensions related to consumers’ selfperception surrounding fun that is perceived to fall out of the socially constructed fun norms are overlooked. Based on the findings, the phenomenon of consumer fun is understood through the application of Giddens’ structuration theory, as the intersection of agency and structureaffecting and informing each other. Consumers continually recreate structure through their participation in fun practices, while pre-existing conventions of such practices constrain their choices and behaviours but at the same time provide a referential vframework within which personal fun experiences are understood and interpreted. Marketisation of fun can either boost consumers’ agency or reinforce the structure, contributing to the construction and circulation of implicitly understood norms regarding what kind of fun practices are ‘appropriate’ for different consumer social groups. This thesis makes the following contributions. First, it provides an original qualitative insight into the phenomenon of consumer fun, revealing the links between fun, self, society, and norm. Second, it extends the critical debate in marketing and consumer research with the insights that bridge the literature emphasising liberation and the literature focussing on constraint in the exploration of fun, reconciling two perspectives through the novel application of structuration theory. Finally, it enables marketers to make more informed choices in their attempts to facilitate, rather than deliver or engineer, fun for their customers through a more critically appreciative understanding of the construct

Date of Award	Mar 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Coventry University
Supervisor	Anvita Kumar (Supervisor), Lee Quinn (Supervisor) & Rui Biscaia (Supervisor)