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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between mental simulation and affective misforecasting of hedonic consumption experiences.

The authors present a series of lab and field studies that manipulate mental simulation and experience type (ordinary versus extraordinary) and measure affective misforecasting and mindfulness. Data were analyzed using a combination of ANOVA and PROCESS.

Mental simulation before an experience causes negative affective misforecasting to occur for extraordinary experiences but not ordinary experiences. The authors further show that mindfulness mediates the effect of mental simulation on affective misforecasting.

The findings provide insight into how thinking about experiences before consumption affects consumers’ actual engagement with the experience. This paper suggests that, by encouraging consumers to mentally simulate their experiences before consumption, marketers may cause consumers to miss out on enjoying their experiences to the fullest. Instead, marketers may want to maintain some mystique by encouraging consumers to “come see for themselves”.

The authors demonstrate a novel cause of affective misforecasting: mental simulation before the experience and provide initial evidence in support of a novel psychological process explanation (i.e. mindfulness) for the effect of mental simulation on affective misforecasting.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how consumers’ affective goal pursuit influences the relationship between their affect and satisfaction in services. In particular, it examines when affect can directly influence satisfaction and when such an impact is mediated by perceived service quality.

This research explores consumers’ consumption goals in three different service contexts, i.e., a primarily pleasure-seeking hedonic service context, a primarily arousal-seeking hedonic service context and a utilitarian (non-affect-seeking) service context.

Results from two studies show that the primary affective consumption goal determines which specific affect can directly influence satisfaction. Other desirable non-primary affect influences satisfaction through the mediation of perceived service quality.

This research focuses on the service contexts in which consumers’ primary consumption goals vary. Further research may focus on the priority and strength of a consumer’s various consumption goals in different services and study how the priority and strength of different consumption goals determine how affect influences quality and satisfaction.

The study provides several insights for service providers and retailers to recognize that consumers’ primary consumption goals may vary in different service contexts, for different consumers, and even at different usage situations. Accordingly, marketers need to develop different strategies for consumer with different goal pursuit in services.

While the literature has documented that consumer affect influences consumer satisfaction in general, it is unclear how different consumption goals influence the impact of affect on satisfaction. This research contributes to the consumer goal literature by demonstrating the importance of primary consumption goals in the post-consumption evaluation of services.

One of the most critical issues facing many industrialized countries is the lack of retirement savings among many individuals. Unfortunately, this lacking can have dire consequences for both consumers and societies in the coming years. Because of this, numerous research studies have been conducted in many disciplines such as economics, psychology, finance, and some in marketing and a number of recommendations or solutions have been made to try to address this critical issue. Yet, despite all this interest, the problem still exists and may even have become worse. In the current chapter, we examine this crisis from a consumer behavior perspective in order to derive new insights and offer additional and hopefully effective solutions to supplement previous efforts.