The Gain from Pain: An Abstract

Abstract

Many things in life don’t come easily. Often losing weight, becoming fit, managing serious illness and getting a higher degree are experiences fraught with difficulty. While pain is recognised as part and parcel of most consumption experiences (Liu et al. 2018; Scott et al. 2017) what it means for value outcomes is less clear. Pain is understudied in service contexts, and when it has, it is bundled with promotions and motivations (Liu et al. 2018) rather than value. Typically value is viewed as a trade-off: costs or sacrifices are subtracted from overall benefits (Zeithaml 1988). An alternate approach, goal directed, means to an end, focuses on the outcome (Gallarza et al. 2011), thus it is about the goal not the difficulty of the journey to get there. But what if the degree of sacrifice increased rather than decreased the overall value? Recent research has indicated that this could be the case (Scott et al. 2017). The current paper posits that this translates into changing the conventional value equation. We could possibly value something particularly highly because it is hard to obtain. This would mean the negatives enhance rather than detract from value; sacrifices could add rather than subtract to benefits, in contrast to the conventional trade-off approach to value adjudication. The current study posits that pain can have an additive effect to value; it can also lead to a positive value outcome. We explored a credence good, that of an executive MBA experience, to analyse positive and negative experiences that occurred during acquisition of the MBA. It focused on peer to peer learning vehicles, namely MBA syndicates. Making use of the critical incident technique, insights were generated on how peer groups contributed towards the value creation process. The findings indicated that syndicate interactions, while often fraught with difficulty, ultimately added more value for personal rather than academic development. There are implications for service design. We further supported the literature on the role of fellow consumers in value creation and we established that negative processes could in themselves create valued outcomes and thereby provide pain as an additive rather than subtractive part of the value process. Findings draw from positive psychology and the concept of flow to explain the navigation of complex service environments where the individual needs to participate and undergo change.