DO NOT EDIT THIS!!!!
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)