The new frontier of consumer experiences: escape through pain

Terms such as consumer experience and experiential consumption have become ubiquitous in the realm of marketing. The last decades have seen a dramatic increase in academic publications exploring these concepts across many different streams and have resulted in significant advances in scholarly understanding. Consumer culture theory (CCT) scholars have particularly participated in this effort by investigating extraordinary experiences and framing them as escapes from everyday life. This paper proposes a summary of CCT contributions on extraordinary experiences and emphasizes the way these works have used the structural/anti-structural coexistence theory to depict the experiences consumers live through. Then it mobilizes a fiction to improve the understanding of escape. This paper highlights how painful leisure pursuits enable consumers to reconnect with their bodies, affording them moments of escape from an otherwise saturated self. The paper shows how the concept of self-escape is important to envision the possibilities in marketing painful experiences.