The effects of the experience recommendation on short- and long-term happiness
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The effects of the experience recommendation on shortand long-term happiness Maria Sääksjärvi 1 & Katarina Hellén 2 & Pieter Desmet 3
# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015
Abstract Previous research has argued that in order to become happier, consumers should prefer experiences over material objects. However, this experience recommendation is based upon measures of short-term happiness. In two empirical studies, we test the experience recommendation for both short- as well as long-term happiness. In line with previous results, it was found that the experience recommendation holds for short-term happiness but data did not support the superiority of the experience recommendation for long-term happiness. More specifically, it was documented that adding a material component to the experience had the best effect upon long-term happiness. Keywords Happiness . Experience recommendation . Happiness-enhancing activities
1 Introduction One of the most important scientifically founded pieces of advice for becoming happier is the experience recommendation, i.e., that consumers should prioritize experiences
* Katarina Hellén [email protected] Maria Sääksjärvi [email protected] Pieter Desmet [email protected] 1
Department Product Innovation Management, Delft University of Technology, Landbergstraat 15, 2628 CE Delft, The Netherlands
2
Faculty of Business Studies, University of Vaasa, P.O. Box 700, 65101 Vaasa, Finland
3
Industrial Design Engineering, Delft University of Technology, Landbergstraat 15, 2628CE Delft, The Netherlands
Mark Lett
over material products (Carter and Gilovich 2010, 2012; Dunn et al. 2011; Van Boven 2005; Rosenzweig and Gilovich 2012).1 There are two issues that are worth noting with regards to the experience recommendation. First, the experience recommendation has only been examined in the context of short-term happiness, i.e., an emotion that is transferrable in nature and varies as a reaction to stimuli (Lyubomirsky 2001), and not in the context of long-term happiness, i.e., the relatively stable subjective perception of joy and the importance of one’s life (Lyubomirsky 2001). Therefore, although we know the experience recommendation has an impact on consumers’ short-term happiness, its longer-term impact remains elusive. Second, the experience recommendation is based on a conceptualization of experiences and material goods as discrete categories. As most offerings comprise elements of both experiences and material goods to various degrees (Hellén and Gummerus 2013), it would be beneficial to investigate a combination of the two. In two studies, we investigate the impact of the experience recommendation both in the short and over the longer term by taking into account that experiences can also have material components. We propose that experiences yield short-term happiness as postulated by the experience recommendation. However, over the longer term, adding a material component to an experience serves to foster long-term happiness. This paper is structured in the
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