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I am interested in enhancing consumer experiences. 


From the mundane to the spectacular. 


Why?

Because consumer experiences dominate modern experience so much that individual consumers, marketers, and policy makers would all be better off if we better understood the answers to this important modern question:

How do we enhance consumer experiences?

When I use to work as an “experience creator” I was interested in what principles could enhance experiences. 

Quickly, I realize it didn't matter how big the backflip was or how visually impressive the Disney Imagineer project was, there were other factors such as how consumers felt about themselves, their relation to other consumers, and their presumptions about the products’ qualities . This lead me to an a psychology major at UC Irvine and a marketing Ph.D at Duke University.

 

Today I explore how to improve experiences and focus on three inter-related socio-psychological constructs.

These three constructs (with a dash of empathy as well) also related to my non-experience focused projects.




My dissertation looks at enhancing experiences through subjective mastery.

Subjective mastery is the feeling of some expertise with a consumer domain. 

Generally it makes people enjoy items more.

It is both a chronic feeling and 
something that can change based on momentary feedback.

We find this subjective mastery effect is stronger for high versus low quality items. And this even occurs even if we just tell consumers the item is high quality. 

(and further even if the item is just a terrible short story I wrote as a 20-year-old)

We find these effects occurs in part through identity. 

Importantly we draw a distinction between two types of enjoyment.

Item-Enjoyment:
enjoyment experienced from the consumption item itself
 (e.g. liking of the taste)


Process-Enjoyment:
enjoyment experienced from the consumption process
 (e.g. critiquing the taste)

Accordingly, subjective mastery can lead to increased process-enjoyment independent of item-enjoyment, such as when critiquing low quality items.

In past work, feelings about the process and the item have been intertwined (e.g. in the IKEA effect, intrinsic motivation) or not explicitly examined together.

 In our investigation, we examine how feelings about the item and the process can at times operate separately. Accordingly our work expands on and integrates these past findings into our overall framework.


Finally, a major goal of our work is to represent  the concept of subjective mastery to consumer field through a formal framework and a focus on enjoyment. The hope is to open the door to future research on this powerful and pervasive construct, which invites new questions. I explore some of these in the later half of my dissertation. 

A past project looked at self-perceived as well other-perceived expertise and find that it has problems for consumer recommendations. 

We find consumers with lots of experiences with items (e.g.  advertisements, comedy) are often poor at making predictions about how novices will feel about these items due to personal repeated exposure bias. 

 This problem is often compounded by the fact that both novice and experienced consumers’ incorrectly believing that experience uniformly improves recommendations and word of mouth.   

This paper is often referred to the Lady Gaga paper as one experiment found that repeated exposure to Lady Gaga images worsens people's abilities to predict novice's reactions to the Lady Gaga images.

This research also touches on empathy and social prediction accuracy. These constructs underlie explicitly or implicitly many of the following projects (e.g. when to share about experience, why environmental marketing has failed to appeal to non-enviornmentalists).

Personal & Social Goals

Three other projects examine how consumers balance personal and other goals in consumptions. This helps give us a richer understanding of consumers concerns, behaviors, and sharing tendencies regarding experiences.

The Giving Misery Company project examines sharing about experiences. 

The Matching Project involves shared consumption with stigmatized consumers.

The Vice-Virtue Project examines balancing health and taste goals through our novel "a little bit of sin" bundles and analyses of consumer welfare. 

Identity

In another line of research I examine identity, self-concerns (e.g. beliefs, social groups, desires), and motivated cognition. 

This line has always related to marketing. For instance, we find the popular denial of many problems (e.g. climate change) is driven not by the problem itself but by the association solutions (e.g. government regulation) and that understanding this “solution aversion” motivated denial can improve scientific communication and cause related marketing.

 *solution aversion

However, recently my identity work has become more fused with my experience work  as I look at how differenet identities (e.g.  mastery-identity) affect consumer experiences. 

So that’s my short academic story so far. 

In my early career I am excited to develop a web of projects around few interconnected socio-psychological constructs focused mostly around the question: "How do we enhance consumer experiences?"

In the immediate future I seek to open up the door to new questions regarding mastery (e.g. the burdens and pleasures of)
identity (e.g. effects on fantasy enjoyment and motivated cognition)
social/personal concerns (e.g. in co-consumption) 
empathy (e.g. marketing communication, advice giving)

Contact me at Troy.Campbell@duke.edu or @TroyHCampbell
if you have questions or collaboration ideas.