For thirty years, the most reliable advice in consumer research has been to spend on experiences rather than things. The logic is familiar: the memory of a trip outlasts the enjoyment of a gadget; the pleasure of ownership fades faster than the pleasure of doing something. A study from Clemson University published in the European Journal of Marketing this year complicates that picture — not by reversing it, but by introducing a third category that neither side of the debate accounted for.
The research led by associate professor Anastasia Thyroff, she and co-author Matthew Hawkins of the Burgundy School of Business in France call, introduces what she and co-author Matthew Hawkins call “activity engagement purchases”: spending made not to own an object or experience a peak moment, but to enable an ongoing practice. Running shoes used to train. An instrument played regularly. A class that builds a skill across months. Across six studies involving hundreds of participants, this category consistently produced higher levels of reported happiness than either traditional material goods or experiential spending.
The third category
The distinction Thyroff draws is not about whether something is physical or digital, tangible or intangible. It is about intent. An activity engagement purchase is made in service of something the buyer plans to keep doing. The temporal dimension is the defining feature: the purchase is not the point. What the purchase enables over time is the point.
This shifts the question that matters from what you bought to what you are still doing because of it. Almost all product content online is structured around the first question. The research suggests the second is the one that predicts whether the purchase will actually deliver on what buyers hoped it would.
Why “experiences beat things” was only half the answer
The experiential-advantage finding that dominated the field for three decades was not wrong. Experiences do tend to produce more lasting happiness than comparable material goods. But the Clemson research suggests the relevant variable was never really “experience vs. thing.” It was whether the purchase enables something that continues.
A one-off experience produces what Thyroff, drawing on Aristotle, calls hedonic happiness: pleasure tied to a moment. An activity engagement purchase, when it works, produces eudaimonia — the satisfaction that comes from becoming something over time, from growing competent in a practice, from expressing a value through repeated action. These are not the same kind of happiness, and they are not interchangeable.
What this means for how products get written about
Product content — reviews, roundups, recommendation guides — is structured around the decision to buy. The writing begins at the moment of evaluation and ends at the point of acquisition. The Clemson research suggests that is precisely where the story that actually matters about a product begins.
The purchases people report as most meaningful are the ones that disappeared into how they live. A cook whose knives became part of daily practice. A runner who associates their shoes with a transformation of how they spend their mornings. This is not the content of a product review. It is the content of a different kind of writing about products — one that positions the object not as the endpoint of a transaction but as the entry point to a practice.
For anyone writing about products with the aim of being useful rather than merely influential at the moment of purchase, this finding is harder to ignore than it might appear. The most accurate question to ask about almost any product is not whether it is worth buying. It is whether it is likely to be worth living with.
