On the Engineering of Fun: Activating Liberation Increases Consumer Fun

• Main Authors: Oh, Travis Tae, Pham, Michel Tuan
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Consumer behavior; Emancipation
• ISSN: 0098-9258

Fun is one of the most pursued and prevalent notions in today's marketplace. A search of the keyword "fun" on Amazon.com returns more than 500,000 results across a broad range of product categories, which is more than four times the Amazon results for either "happy" or "relax." The concept of fun is also common in various advertising messages (e.g., Skippy: "Fuel the Fun!" or Las Vegas: "the Fun Never Sets"), reflective of the central role that fun plays in marketing. Yet, despite high consumer demand for fun, very little is known about how to systematically and effectively create fun experiences. Only recently, an emerging theory on the consumer psychology of fun states that a sense of liberation-defined as a temporary release from psychological restriction-is a key antecedent to the experience of fun (Oh and Pham 2018; Oh 2020). This theoretical proposition, however, has yet to be fully tested. To fill this empirical gap, we aim to achieve two main objectives in this article-(1) investigate the causal relationship between liberation and fun and (2) explore the concept of boundedness as a means to engineer fun- through four studies. Study 1a And 1b In studies la and lb, we prime individuals with the concept of liberation and measure how much fun they had during the priming manipulation. While it is customary to measure the effect of priming on a subsequent, unrelated task (i.e., incidental effect), we expect that people will experience more fun when liberation is activated within the task (i.e., an integral effect). Study Design. Participants were randomly assigned to either a control or liberation word puzzle condition (N=183) in study 1a and one of three (control vs. liberation vs. achievement) conditions in study lb (N=329). All participants solved word puzzles and were asked to find two target words. The target words were adapted from an anagram study that tested the semantic concept of freedom vs. control (Meyers-Levy and Zhu 2007). After completing the word puzzle tasks, participants were measured on fun, engagement, difficulty, valence, and arousal. Results. A one-way ANCOVA (controlling for education) revealed a significant positive effect of the liberation condition on fun (p = .029 in study 1 and p = .02 in study 2). All other measures were not significantly different between conditions. Discussion. Study 1a and lb show direct evidence on how feelings of liberation can increase the level of fun experienced during a given task. In the next study,