If No One Saw It on Instagram, Was It Any Good? Examining Received Attention as a Social Benefit of Experiential Consumption

Consumers frequently share experiences online for self-presentation purposes (Schau and Gilly 2003). Social benefits of such sharing are realized when others provide explicit feedback (likes and comments), which can affirm the sender’s behavior (Toma and Hancock 2013). Therefore, consumers’ experiential evaluations should only be influenced by online sharing if others provide explicit feedback affirming their choices (positive social influence or proof; Cialdini 1993). The present research leverages the attention economy to challenge this assumption by demonstrating that pure attention received from such experiential sharing (i.e., number of views) influences experiential perceptions, even when attention is unpolluted by valence or affirmation. By viewing attention as a social resource, we demonstrate that consumers are more satisfied with experiences that attract more attention. The attention economy (Davenport and Beck 2001) proposes that human attention is a scarce and valuable resource sought by consumers (Derber 2000). When one receives attention, it signals the strength of one’s social standing because others have deemed one’s signal worthy despite competing available signals (Falkinger 2007; Kessous 2015). As such, receiving high levels of attention should increase one’s perceived social self-esteem (Heatherton and Polivy 1991). When attention is attracted due to a consumption experience, attention-driven SSE should be viewed as a social benefit of consumption, thus increasing experiential satisfaction relative to those receiving low attention, and to one’s initial (pre-sharing) satisfaction levels. Further, if attention is a social benefit of consumption, it should affect satisfaction similarly to other product benefits. Therefore, we propose that attention will have a stronger influence on satisfaction among consumers who have a stronger desire for peer attention (i.e., high public self-consciousness; Scheier and Carver 1980). Further, as a consumption benefit, the effect of attention on satisfaction should depend on consumer expectations (Oliver 1980). We therefore expect that negative disconfirmation (receiving less attention than expected) should have a stronger effect on satisfaction than positive disconfirmation (Anderson and Sullivan 1993). Lastly, an alternative explanation for our hypothesized effects is that, when explicit feedback is unavailable, consumers use received attention as a proxy for behavioral affirmation. To rule out this explanation, we test our proposed attention effects in the context of a negative experience. Because sharing negative experiences can decrease self-esteem (Moore 2014), attention attracted to a negative experience should only increase satisfaction if it is viewed as a social benefit of consumption.