Multi-Experience Framing: The Mere Perception of Experiencing Multiple Stimuli Increases Enjoyment

Abstract Hedonic experiences often involve multiple components that are experienced simultaneously. When watching a video clip, for instance, consumers simultaneously experience acoustic and visual elements. The authors study how framing the same experience as either a single whole (single-experience framing) or as a combination of multiple simultaneous experiences (multi-experience framing) shapes hedonic enjoyment. Across 12 studies that span a variety of consumption contexts (e.g., food, videos, music, paintings, games), this work shows that multi-experience framing increases consumers’ enjoyment of the experience and also affects consequential choices such as the willingness to continue the experience. This enjoyment boost occurs because multi-experience framing leads consumers to invest more attention into the experience. The authors also establish two boundary conditions for this effect: multi-experience framing does not boost enjoyment if consumers already pay high attention to the experience for other reasons (e.g., extrinsic rewards) or when the experience is negatively valenced. By investigating how the framing of experiences as multiple simultaneous components shapes hedonic enjoyment, these findings extend existing research on gestalt psychology, partitioning, and bundling further into the hedonic domain. This simple, yet effective, framing manipulation can help marketers, policymakers, and everyday people to maximize the hedonic enjoyment for various commonplace experiences.