买体验还是实物?
Hello, all you Psychopunk friends.
The Spring Festival is just around the corner. On behalf of all the Psychopunk hosts and our editor-in-chief, Old Wei, let me wish you an early Happy New Year—and may good luck follow you everywhere!
In this Spring Festival special, we’re talking about how to spend money during the holidays.
When the holidays roll around, what should you buy to treat yourself?
For years, one question in consumer psychology has sparked a great deal of research: if you spend the same amount of money, is it more worthwhile to spend it on experiences, or on physical products? Experiences include travel, seeing a movie or a play, having a fancy meal, getting a spa treatment—in other words, spending that satisfies psychological needs. Physical products are things you can see and touch, such as appliances, phones, and clothes.
We face these two choices in our holiday spending, too. It’s the Spring Festival: if you’re spending several thousand yuan, would it be better to use it for a trip and go have a great time, or to replace the sofa at home and give the place a fresh New Year makeover?
The answer depends on when you ask consumers.
If you survey people within a relatively short period after they finish spending, the general response is that experiences offer better value. Spend 1,000 yuan on a concert, and the happiness you get seems to outweigh the happiness from spending the same amount on a watch or an electronic gadget.
Why is that? There are roughly two reasons:
First, it’s hard to compare the value of money spent on experiences after the fact. If you spent 1,000 yuan on a Hua Chenyu concert, versus spending that money on a Jacky Cheung concert, which was more worth it? There’s simply no way to measure it. And if we can’t compare, we won’t compare. Physical products, however, are much easier to compare. For one thing, many of their specifications are quantifiable: this phone has a little more storage than that one, but fewer camera megapixels. For another, newer models and better-value competitors keep appearing. All of this makes consumers likely to compare after buying a physical product. And once you compare, it’s easy to discover that what you bought wasn’t necessarily the best value for money. Naturally, that can be a little annoying.
The second reason is that we use different purchasing strategies when buying experiences and physical products. When buying a physical product, consumers like a strategy called “maximizing value for money.” Put bluntly, you compare the features and prices of every similar product across every possible sales channel before deciding where to buy and which one to choose. The problem is that the number of choices facing consumers is practically infinite. To maximize value for money, you have to do a ridiculous amount of homework. Just comparing prices is exhausting. It seriously damages the shopping experience.
But when buying an experience, people prefer another strategy called “good enough.” You set a standard in your mind, look at a few options, and place the order once you find one that meets it. Naturally, this process is much easier and less labor-intensive than maximizing value for money.
Because of these factors, for a short while after completing a purchase, people often feel that spending money on a physical product is less worthwhile than spending it on an experience.
Some consumer psychologists therefore suggest that since buying experiences feels better, we should also try to think more about the experience a physical product will give us when we buy one.
Many products have both a physical-product side and an experiential side. Take buying a music album: even if it’s a digital version, you can say that you bought a product—that’s looking at it from the physical-product angle. But you can also say that you bought an experience, because every time you play the music, it gives you psychological enjoyment. Psychologists have run experiments in which people were asked to experience the same product from these two angles. The result: viewing a product from the experiential angle increased people’s satisfaction.
However, all these conclusions that “buying experiences is better than buying physical products” have one premise: they come from surveys conducted within a short period after the purchase was completed.
So what happens if we stretch the whole consumer experience over a longer period? Would the conclusion change? In 2015, several psychologists studied this question by tracking how people’s feelings changed over the several weeks after making a purchase. They found that, as time passed, the happiness brought by physical products gradually caught up. That’s because spending money on an experience usually gives you one huge burst of happiness. In the short term, its pleasure naturally has a crushing advantage. Spending money on a physical item, however, brings many small pleasures. Especially when you use it frequently, you keep encountering the good things it brings to your everyday life. So after some time has passed, the happiness from the experience gradually fades, while the small pleasures from the physical item keep giving you occasional little jolts. Over time, buying the physical item may actually pull ahead.
So, based on the current findings in consumer psychology, experience consumption and physical-product consumption are more or less tied overall. The difference is simply between “one powerful burst of pleasure” and “small moments of happiness that accumulate over time.” Whether you should spend money on an experience or a physical product depends on which kind of feeling you prefer.
Perhaps the best choice is to spend one sum of money and get both an experience and a physical product. For example, buying a game console along with a few good games might be the best of both worlds: you get the satisfaction of owning a physical product, while also enjoying the wonderful experience of playing those games again and again over a fairly long period.
Everything we’ve discussed so far also rests on another assumption: whether we spend money on an experience or a physical product, we’re satisfied with what we bought. We’re comparing two kinds of satisfaction to see which one is more satisfying.
But in real life, of course, not every purchase buys us satisfaction. Plenty of purchases leave us thinking, “I paid money for a headache.” So if both purchases are disappointing, which is more likely to make us regret it: a lousy experience or a lousy physical product? Psychologists have found that a lousy experience produces more regret. Perhaps that’s because even if you’re unhappy with a physical product, you still have something visible and tangible in your hands. If the experience is lousy, it feels like you got absolutely nothing for your money—a spectacular rip-off.
And as consumers, naturally, we hope to avoid whichever kind of spending feels more like a rip-off. So how can we spend money in a way that leaves us with fewer regrets?
Let’s set product quality aside and answer this from a consumer-psychology perspective. Often, when we regret a purchase, it’s because we imagine the post-purchase experience in a way that’s too abstract.
For example, when you decide to spend money on a trip, how do you imagine it? Usually, we only picture how beautiful the destination will be and how great our photos will look on social media. We don’t imagine all the details of the journey: that you may spend more than half the trip on the road; that the destination’s economy may be underdeveloped, making it hard to book a comfortable hotel; or that the hotel you booked may not even have a reliable supply of hot water.
Or take the decision to spend money on a high-end DSLR camera. How do you imagine that? You picture yourself taking photographer-level photos. You don’t picture how impractical it is to carry such a heavy, bulky camera every time you leave the house.
Before spending money, we tend to imagine only one or two beautiful scenes of the experience a product will give us, while failing to imagine the concrete details of using it. But what a product really gives us is the sum of those one or two scenes and all the details we ignored. Its actual pleasantness will inevitably be far less impressive than those one or two scenes.
So before deciding to make a purchase, the rational thing to do is spend some time imagining all the details of using the product—the more concrete, the better. Before buying a DSLR, don’t just imagine how beautiful the photos will be. Imagine how you’ll carry the camera out, how you’ll set up the tripod when you reach the place where you want to take photos, how you’ll post-process the photos afterward, and how you’ll maintain the camera if dust gets into the lens. Once you’ve imagined all those details, you may lose the urge to buy the DSLR. And if you still think owning it would make you happy, then placing the order at that point makes future regret much less likely.
All right, today we shared several findings from recent psychological research on consumer decisions: buying an experience brings a one-time peak of happiness that boosts your sense of well-being in the short term, while buying a physical item brings small pleasures that trickle in over time. Thinking through the details before placing an order can help you avoid regret afterward.
I hope this knowledge helps.
Finally, I wish you all a Spring Festival full of purchases that make you happy. Once again, Happy New Year—and see you next time!
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