Abstract:

Rationale and purpose:
Psychology and Marketing are close disciplines; however, there are very few ways of connecting topics and learning experiences among them. The purpose of this paper is to provide a cross fertilization between Psychology and Marketing, which is meant to be beneficial for both students in Psychology and Marketing teachers.
More precisely, we propose to depict an in-class exercise aimed at generating experiential knowledge among Master students belonging to the elective subject “Marketing” in the Erasmus Mundus European Master in Work, Organizational, and Personnel Psychology (WOP-P) (https://www.uv.es/erasmuswop/), from the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Valencia (Spain). In the exercise, students have to describe situations of consumption and classify them through the lens of classical frameworks from Marketing on the concept of Consumer Value.

Background:
In Marketing, the concept of Consumer Value has received extensive research interest especially regarding the methodological development and measurement of its dimensionality. Multiple multidimensional scales of value exist, but with no preferred dimensionality (nor in the number of dimensions, nor in the nature: cognitive, affective, social…).

Method:
The exercise was scheduled in 3 steps.
STEP 1. Students were first asked to read literature on the concept of consumer value in general, and more precisely on 3 different approaches to value dimensionality.
a) Holbrook (1999) with 8 dimensions: efficiency, excellence (quality), play, aesthetics, esteem, status, ethics, and spirituality.
b) Sweeney and Soutar (2001)’s PERVAL scale with 4 dimensions: emotional value, social value, value for money and product quality.
c) Mathwick et al. (2001) with 4 dimensions: aesthetics, playfulness, service excellence, and customer Return on Investment.
STEP 2. Students (which are all graduate in Psychology) were asked to write 6 short narratives (400 words each) depicting 3 different situations of consumption in three realms: A) Retailing (shopping experiences, tourism shopping, on line shopping…); B) Education (attending conferences, watching videos…); and C) Hospitality (restaurants, hotels, theme parks…). The consumption situations had to be described in terms of varied and multifaceted experiences.
STEP 3. In class, the instructor collected the narratives and distributed the texts (3 different situations to each student, but never their own) among the 9 students. Students are asked to match each situation to a specific framework from the literature (and provide written rationale in 400 words). To produce the desired cross fertilization, students had to bridge their understanding as psychologist of the nature of the dimensions (cognitive, affective, intrinsic, extrinsic, social,…) with the knowledge acquired from their readings on Consumer Value scales.

Expected results:
The paper will show how the exercise was aimed at making students experiment their ability for judging the suitability of the three different value scales in the three different consumption situations, and therefore gain knowledge on the universality and practicality of the Consumer Value concept. Moreover, the instructor obtained outcomes for further teaching and researching on the psychological underpinnings of each value dimension and the idiosyncrasy of each Consumer Value framework.

Keywords:

Consumer Value scales, in class exercise, consumption experiences, Psychology and Marketing.