(working title) Consumption in the imagination: How goods and services give structure to everyday thinking.
It is evident that the market widely acknowledges the use of the imagination in consumption in a variety of ways. Beyond advertising, which provides scripts for people’s daydreams (‘wouldn’t it be great/awful/life-changing if…’), there is evidence of more ambitious projects by marketers and individuals to engage with the imagination. For instance, website wish lists, nostalgia based products (Mini, VW Beetle, Smeg refrigerators), eBay is based on anticipating the win of the auction as well as collecting and recapturing things from the past. Social networking sites hype up ‘ordinary’ events making them highly anticipated and afterwards the site becomes a place to reminisce. Some 90,000 YouTube videos feature the ritualised behaviour of unboxing; the culmination of consumer desire and anticipation. Yet in consumer research we see a narrow approach to the phenomenon. One which focuses on imagining in a pre-consumption context and is conceptualised as a pleasurable, future orientated experience based on wishes and desires, most commonly referred to as ‘consumption dreaming’ or ‘daydreaming’ (Campbell 1987, Fournier and Guiry 1993, d’Astous and Deschênes 2005).
Imagination is taken to be our overall ability to experience things in our mind in the absence of their material presence (Casey 2000). It accounts for a wide range of mental activities (Thomas 2004) such as daydream, fantasy, mind wandering, anticipation, supposing, nostalgia, reminisce, worry – the list goes on. So it seems strange that only a limited number of forms of imagining have so far been considered in consumer behaviour.
In unpacking the literature implicit references to the imagination are present in studies of dissonance (Festinger 1957, Oshikawa 1969), buyer’s remorse (Bell 1982, Tsiros and Mittal 2000), satisfaction (Oliver and Mano 1993, Gardial et al 1994) and nostalgia (Havlena and Holak 1991). These studies often tend to rationalise the imagination in relation to post-consumption thoughts and feelings, failing to link such terms and concepts to a broader framework of imaginative consumption. For instance, dissonance is viewed as regret, it is not explored in relation to alternative ways of imagining, for example; how might we imagine an alternative purchase? Or what we might do if we still had the money in our pocket?
The implication of thinking more broadly has led me to consider literature from the fields of psychology, sociology and philosophy, which present a broader view of the imagination and take into account various components (thought, mental imagery, emotions, bodily sensations), characteristics (temporal location, degree to which reality is adhered to, spontaneous or deliberate nature of the activity) and purposes (pleasure and coping based or rehearsal/planning based) of imagining which, enables different imaginative forms or experiences to be identified and shows that there are moreaspects of imagining than have been explicitly considered in consumer behaviour research (see for example Singer 1966, Cohen and Taylor 1976, Klinger 1990, Casey 2000).
The purpose of my PhD is to open up the concept of imagination, to go beyond the idea of ‘consumption dreaming’ – about things we hope to own or experience one day (Fournier and Guiry 1993, d’Astous and Deschênes 2005), and study the imagination in the context of everyday life. My focus is on the ways in which our hopes, desires, fears and worries for life are expressed to ourselves in the imagination. And more specifically, the role of commodities in our imaginings – as anchors for other experiences and meanings (Douglas and Isherwood 1979, Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton 1981). The aim? To explore how we think with and about ‘things’, in order to produce a more complete theory of imaginative consumption – one that acknowledges it as a more significant part of consumer research.
