| In recent years, there has been a growing prominence of the "fun" concept in the current marketing environment. With the proliferation of entertainment products, fun is emerging as an important design goal in product development and marketing communications. Within consumer research, although fun is recognized as a central element in hedonic, playful and experiential consumption, systematic frameworks explicitly focusing on the concept of fun are limited. Especially lacking is an understanding of how consumers interpret fun as part of their product experiences. Since fun presumably underlies consumers' preferences for entertainment products and services, this gap in the literature is significant.; This dissertation addresses the gap by using insights from young adults' engagement with video games. In particular, it examines the dynamics underlying consumer fun and discusses its theoretical and marketing implications. Drawing upon literature on consumer research, sociology, and human-computer interaction and integrating them with grounded theory analysis of semi-structured interviews and projective data, this study develops a new conceptual framework on the underpinnings of consumer fun. The framework suggests that consumers' meanings of fun are heterogeneous and that fun is manifested in multiple modes. In particular, five modes of fun are identified which include: hard fun, relational fun, phantasmagoric fun, instrumental fun, and precarious fun. Each of these fun modes is constituted through a combination of unique consumption processes and consumer strategies, which are also identified based on empirical data. The conceptual framework is discussed in light of its theoretical contribution to the domain of experiential consumption and implications for product innovation research, game design and interactive communications. |
