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This paper describes the personal history and intellectual development of Morris B. Holbrook (MBH), a participant in the field of marketing academics in general and consumer research in particular.

The paper pursues an approach characterized by historical autoethnographic subjective personal introspection or HASPI.

The paper reports the personal history of MBH and – via HASPI – interprets various aspects of key participants and major themes that emerged over the course of his career.

The main implication is that every scholar in the field of marketing pursues a different light, follows a unique path, plays by idiosyncratic rules, and deserves individual attention, consideration, and respect … like a cat that carries its own leash.

In the case of MBH, like (say) a jazz musician, whatever value he might have depends on his originality.

This paper aims to trace the origins, development and future of the consumption experience as a concept in marketing and consumer research.

The author relies on subjective personal introspection to describe his involvement in the introduction and elaboration of the consumption-experience concept.

The author finds that the concept of the consumption experience has extended to many areas of marketing and consumer research, with widespread applicability in the creation of brand-related promotional messages.

The consumption experience is central to our understanding of consumers and deserves full exploration in the work of consumer researchers.

Working with Professor Elizabeth Hirschman, the author played a pioneering role in understanding the consumption experience and is happy to see that their contribution has encouraged others to pursue related themes.

In the fertile line of research on consumer value from the services literature, a gap exists between theoretical and empirical knowledge, in particular regarding Holbrook’s conceptual value framework. The purpose of this paper is to find construct validity for a multidimensional value scale based on Holbrook’s proposal.

Based on a literature review, a qualitative phase, and consultation with an expert, eight value scales (efficiency, service quality, play, aesthetics, status, esteem, ethics, and escapism as an adaptation of spirituality) are tested on a sample of 585 hotel customers and are further analyzed with simple and partial correlations, multiple regressions, and structural modeling.

Following the literature on the merits of Holbrook’s value typology, results are presented in three concatenated phases: validation of Holbrook’s eight value scales corresponding to his eight value types; interrelationships between these value types showing a predominance of the extrinsic-intrinsic and self-other dimensions; and construction of six indices based on the 2×2×2 matrix (self, other, extrinsic, intrinsic, active, and reactive) and a value index as a higher-order representation. The results support Holbrook’s typology, thereby supporting construct validity for the multidimensional scales.

Implications for further conceptual research on value are presented. Meanwhile, the empirical study is context-specific, i.e. related to a hospitality experience.

Although Holbrook’s typology has gained widespread attention, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, no previous research has tested all eight value types simultaneously in the same empirical work.

The context of marketing and service research is rapidly changing as a result of advances in academic research and business practice. This has implications for our understanding of customer value. The purpose of this paper is to provide an update on customer value given today’s context (including recent advances such as technologies, human contact, collaborative consumption, service ecosystems and transformative service research); to revise Holbrook’s value typology; and to propose a research agenda.

This paper uses a conceptual approach that is rooted in the service and marketing literature.

The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, this paper presents an evolved view on customer value which accounts for recent advances in academic research and business practice. Second, this paper updates Holbrook’s value typology by revising existing value types as well as identifying additional value types; and offers guidelines for measuring and modeling customer value. Third, this paper proposes a research agenda to guide and stimulate future value research.

This paper provides an update on customer value, which is one of the most fundamental concepts in service and marketing research. This updated perspective has been approved and applauded by Morris B. Holbrook, one of the founding fathers of value research.

This paper aims to discuss issues concerning the desirability of finding ways to close the gap between academic research and management practice – especially in the case of marketing and consumer research.

The issues are addressed by means of a personal essay.

The discussion adopts the extreme viewpoint that achieving a reconciliation or resolution of the differences between scholarly inquiry and managerial relevance in either research or teaching constitutes an undesirable or even deplorable form of compromise.

The essay concludes that – contrary to the wisdom of Goldilocks – compromise between academic scholarship and practical relevance merits opprobrium rather than approbation.

Based on an analogy with a recently revived film of The Benny Goodman Story, draws some marketing‐related parallels between jazz musicianship and teaching. Specifically, as in the case of artists, professors may often pursue a product‐oriented strategy stubbornly dedicated to honouring their own convictions at the expense of a customer‐oriented quest for greater potential popularity. Illustrates through an interview with Woody Herman that, as with jazz musicians, so with teachers: one hopes that integrity will win true listeners.

In marketing and consumer research, the application of subjective personal introspection, or SPI, to the understanding of one’s own consumption experiences benefits from the representation of such self‐reflective insights in the most vivid and compelling manner possible. Toward the latter end, stereographic three‐dimensional images may deepen the marketing or consumer researcher’s ability to communicate with managers and other readers in a suitably forceful, engaging, and transparent way. Thus, three‐dimensional photographs in the form of stereo pairs may provide corroborative evidence for the interpretations suggested by SPI or other research approaches. In this, literally, stereo 3D displays enhance the vividness, clarity, realism, and depth of communication between marketing researchers and their audience. But beyond that, figuratively, three‐dimensional stereography also serves as a metaphor to capture the essence of operating on the edge, of attaining profound insights, or of pursuing creativity in the postmodern world of consumption‐oriented hyperreality.

Discusses conceptual links between consuming and buying by indicating reasons for adopting a macro‐level perspective that focuses on products, rather than brands, as the units of analysis. Investigates, empirically, in a study, which collected data on want‐based purchasing reasons and used perceptions from independent samples from UK housewives. Posits that two salient reasons exist for studying such consumption (not purchasing) phenomena: first, experiential aspects of consumption; and second, consumption phenomena (or its anticipation) which are likely to exert a strong influence on buying decisions. Reports that the results herein reported must be viewed as exploratory in nature, with still undetermined potential for generalization to the UK population, or to other cultures. Suggests, finally, that reasons for usage differ markedly between product categories, but, within a product category, reasons for choosing brands tend to be similar.