Consumer Value and Modes of Media Reception: Audience Response to Ryan, a Computer-animated Psycho-realist Documentary and its Own Documentation in Alter Egos

Résumé 0

Consumer value and value creation are fundamental concepts in marketing, management and in literature on organizations, but are almost never considered in the context of screen-based "experience" products. In this paper, the authors depart from the prevailing approaches to audience or reception studies by investigating the experience value the consumption of a screen-based product has for the spectator. Using the Q-methodology and Holbrook's consumer value framework (1999), they empirically identify audience segments based on television viewers' subjective experience with an innovative film product: the award-winning, computer-animated short documentary Ryan. The film uses creative state-of-the art animation to tell a compelling story in ways that stretch the documentary genre. The authors uncover and describe four audience segments. Unexpectedly, these four segments bear a strong resemblance to the four principal modes of media reception proposed recently by Michelle (2007), thereby creating a potentially fruitful link between the framework for consumer experience value and media reception studies.