WEEK 1
Entertainment: the action of providing or being provided with amusement or enjoyment
Latin inter (among) Tenere (keep)
The opposite of entertainment is boredom; if we are not entertained, we are bored
Entertainment has been understood not so much as a product (movie, game or tv
show) or as a feature of such product (action, comedy) but rather as a response to it
Entertainment is ‘any market offering whose main purpose is to provide pleasure to
consumers, versus offering primarily functional utility’
At the heart of entertainment experience lies enjoyment
Our definition for media entertainment: any mediated product created for the
purpose of entertainment
Entertainment models
Differential susceptibility to Media effects model – Valkenburg & peter 2013
Three factors predict media use: Preference, Developmental level, and Social environment
Media effects are transactional, meaning that effects of media use also influence media use
Vorderer, Klimmt and Ritterfeld
2004
,Preference can be based on:
The core of any culture is a set attitudes, values and beliefs that is
shared by a group of people provides norms for their behavior
Popular culture is the domain of entertainment products
created in mass quantities for a mass audience. It is recognized
as a constantly evolving set of practices beliefs/ values that are
dominant in a society at a given point in time
A nation transmits the values of what is to be appreciated (and
what ixt not) to its members, as part of a continuous and often lifelong socialization process
Consumers’ entertainment choices show their personal values, ambitions beliefs, and
perceptions of the world and themselves
The “cultural congruence” between a movie and the audience influences how much
consumers like the movie
Zeitgeist
Cultural trends can make consumers “ripe” for a product. The fit of any entertainment
product’s genres and themes with people’s interests and desires may be high or low during
certain periods.
History provides examples that entertainment can become an embodiment of a certain
cultural zeitgeist, capturing and reflecting the life style of a certain period.
Entertainment products are more attractive in bleaker economic times, despite consumers
having less money at their disposal.
User characteristics, cultural influences and previous entertainment experience influence
your attitude, your opinion, your beliefs, or state of mind regarding entertainment products.
This preference influences the process of selection.
Escapism: the tendency to seek distraction and relief from unpleasant realities, especially by
seeking entertainment or engaging in fantasy
attempts to explicate how media may provide some sort of mental retreat for
users who feel uncomfortable in their actual lives
motivation can relate to a person’s immediate social environment, his or
her general work and life situation or simply the sense of emptiness that is perceived
when there is nothing to do.
Mood management theory describes that the use of entertainment serves the regulation of
positives mood states
Based on the hedonistic premises that individuals are motivated to experience
pleasure and avoid pain, individuals tend to select entertainment to
maximize/maintain a good mood, or dimmish a bad mood
Light -hearted entertainment Hedonism state
Hedonism = Pleasure and amusement are the highest good and proper aim of
human life
,o Familiarity refers to a consumer perceiving a sense of connection with an entertainment
product and/or its elements and characters
o Nostalgia involves preferences for things or experiences that were more common when
one was younger
o The reminiscence bump effect: we call early-life memories most readily we like songs,
movies, and television programs that most that were popular when we were between 16
and 24
o The moderate-discrepancy hypothesis: that anything that is slightly different from what
we are very familiar with tends to get our attention than when we encounter something
that is greatly diverse or extremely similar to what we are very familiar with
Social cognitive theory: children’s behavior is learned by watching what others do/will not
do in the environment in which one grows up. By imitating the observed behavior, the
observer solidifies that behavior and is rewarded with positive reinforcement
o The band wagon effect is a phenomenon whereby the probability of individual adoption
increases with respect to the proportion of those who have already done so
o Asch (1951) indicated the power of social conformity and normative social influence; the
willingness to conform to public opinion to attain social acceptance and/or avoid social
exclusion.
Media habits are a form of automatic and non-conscious media consumption behavior that
develops as people repeat frequent media consumption behavior
Entertainment media expands and reinforces associations among consumption behaviors
and cultural symbols. Through these rich networks of associations, infrequent media
consumption behaviors (e.g., playing holiday music) may also become habitual.
Obsessions are thoughts are person cannot stop from having
Compulsions are behaviors a person cannot stop enacting
Media addition is excessive, obsessive, and compulsive media use that cannot be controlled
despite negative consequences
Media entertainment model:
Entertainment products are experience
goods, meaning that this experience
dominates our judgements. Which will likely
affect your preference for future use of that
product, and the cycle goes on and on.
Notice that response is not the same as
effect. In this model we do not look at the
media effects unless they change your
preference towards entertainment products.
Mediated products created for the purpose of entertaining it users
Entertainment products are “information good” economic offerings that are valued
mostly because of the information they carry
Because the attributes of the experience dominate consumers’ quality judgements for these
products, they are also referred to as “experience goods”
, For experience goods such as entertainment products, the information that a consumer can
gain about a product’s quality via experiencing the product is far superior to the information
about its quality he or she can gain through pre-consumption search
Before experiencing the entertainment product, the label is simply a collection of objective
information to identify an entertainment product. This could include:
Medium: the means by which it is communicated
Any means through which sensory impression are conveyed to an audience
Title: the name of an entertainment product
Four aspects of (brand) names can help consumers draw cognitive inferences
about the brand and trigger emotional responses, which might influence consumer’s
attitudes:
+ Phonetics – certain sounds can trigger reactions
+ Orthography – spelling (unconventional)
+ Morphology – form, shape or structure (font)
+ Semantics – meaning (use a metaphor)
Category/ genre: describes a certain category of entertainment
A genre, is an abstract concept that describes a certain category of entertainment
or art
Any genre evokes imagery in user’s semantic network of associations that is
activated once they hear that an entertainment product belongs to that genre
Associations help us to make quick judgement regarding what to expect, and
whether we might like it
Brand: semantic network of impression in the consumer’s mind
Brands have two key functions:
1) an “awareness function”: a brand can generate immediate attention
2) an “image function”: the semantic network of associations surrounding a brand
provide the basis by which consumers identify with a brand and differentiate the
brand from others
The medium is the message (McLuhan, 1964): the medium influences how the message is
perceived
Form excludes the content (Postman, 1985): A particular medium can only sustain a limited
level of ideas
Suspension of disbelief: justifies the use (and enjoyment) of fantastic or non-realistic
elements in fiction essential for engagement with any kind of fictional narrative
(automatic process)
Experiences
- Immersion indicates the extent to which a medium can deliver an inclusive, extensive,
and vivid illusion of a depicted reality
- Presence is used to describe the degree in which an individual believes to be present in a
virtual environment (user)
Entertainment: the action of providing or being provided with amusement or enjoyment
Latin inter (among) Tenere (keep)
The opposite of entertainment is boredom; if we are not entertained, we are bored
Entertainment has been understood not so much as a product (movie, game or tv
show) or as a feature of such product (action, comedy) but rather as a response to it
Entertainment is ‘any market offering whose main purpose is to provide pleasure to
consumers, versus offering primarily functional utility’
At the heart of entertainment experience lies enjoyment
Our definition for media entertainment: any mediated product created for the
purpose of entertainment
Entertainment models
Differential susceptibility to Media effects model – Valkenburg & peter 2013
Three factors predict media use: Preference, Developmental level, and Social environment
Media effects are transactional, meaning that effects of media use also influence media use
Vorderer, Klimmt and Ritterfeld
2004
,Preference can be based on:
The core of any culture is a set attitudes, values and beliefs that is
shared by a group of people provides norms for their behavior
Popular culture is the domain of entertainment products
created in mass quantities for a mass audience. It is recognized
as a constantly evolving set of practices beliefs/ values that are
dominant in a society at a given point in time
A nation transmits the values of what is to be appreciated (and
what ixt not) to its members, as part of a continuous and often lifelong socialization process
Consumers’ entertainment choices show their personal values, ambitions beliefs, and
perceptions of the world and themselves
The “cultural congruence” between a movie and the audience influences how much
consumers like the movie
Zeitgeist
Cultural trends can make consumers “ripe” for a product. The fit of any entertainment
product’s genres and themes with people’s interests and desires may be high or low during
certain periods.
History provides examples that entertainment can become an embodiment of a certain
cultural zeitgeist, capturing and reflecting the life style of a certain period.
Entertainment products are more attractive in bleaker economic times, despite consumers
having less money at their disposal.
User characteristics, cultural influences and previous entertainment experience influence
your attitude, your opinion, your beliefs, or state of mind regarding entertainment products.
This preference influences the process of selection.
Escapism: the tendency to seek distraction and relief from unpleasant realities, especially by
seeking entertainment or engaging in fantasy
attempts to explicate how media may provide some sort of mental retreat for
users who feel uncomfortable in their actual lives
motivation can relate to a person’s immediate social environment, his or
her general work and life situation or simply the sense of emptiness that is perceived
when there is nothing to do.
Mood management theory describes that the use of entertainment serves the regulation of
positives mood states
Based on the hedonistic premises that individuals are motivated to experience
pleasure and avoid pain, individuals tend to select entertainment to
maximize/maintain a good mood, or dimmish a bad mood
Light -hearted entertainment Hedonism state
Hedonism = Pleasure and amusement are the highest good and proper aim of
human life
,o Familiarity refers to a consumer perceiving a sense of connection with an entertainment
product and/or its elements and characters
o Nostalgia involves preferences for things or experiences that were more common when
one was younger
o The reminiscence bump effect: we call early-life memories most readily we like songs,
movies, and television programs that most that were popular when we were between 16
and 24
o The moderate-discrepancy hypothesis: that anything that is slightly different from what
we are very familiar with tends to get our attention than when we encounter something
that is greatly diverse or extremely similar to what we are very familiar with
Social cognitive theory: children’s behavior is learned by watching what others do/will not
do in the environment in which one grows up. By imitating the observed behavior, the
observer solidifies that behavior and is rewarded with positive reinforcement
o The band wagon effect is a phenomenon whereby the probability of individual adoption
increases with respect to the proportion of those who have already done so
o Asch (1951) indicated the power of social conformity and normative social influence; the
willingness to conform to public opinion to attain social acceptance and/or avoid social
exclusion.
Media habits are a form of automatic and non-conscious media consumption behavior that
develops as people repeat frequent media consumption behavior
Entertainment media expands and reinforces associations among consumption behaviors
and cultural symbols. Through these rich networks of associations, infrequent media
consumption behaviors (e.g., playing holiday music) may also become habitual.
Obsessions are thoughts are person cannot stop from having
Compulsions are behaviors a person cannot stop enacting
Media addition is excessive, obsessive, and compulsive media use that cannot be controlled
despite negative consequences
Media entertainment model:
Entertainment products are experience
goods, meaning that this experience
dominates our judgements. Which will likely
affect your preference for future use of that
product, and the cycle goes on and on.
Notice that response is not the same as
effect. In this model we do not look at the
media effects unless they change your
preference towards entertainment products.
Mediated products created for the purpose of entertaining it users
Entertainment products are “information good” economic offerings that are valued
mostly because of the information they carry
Because the attributes of the experience dominate consumers’ quality judgements for these
products, they are also referred to as “experience goods”
, For experience goods such as entertainment products, the information that a consumer can
gain about a product’s quality via experiencing the product is far superior to the information
about its quality he or she can gain through pre-consumption search
Before experiencing the entertainment product, the label is simply a collection of objective
information to identify an entertainment product. This could include:
Medium: the means by which it is communicated
Any means through which sensory impression are conveyed to an audience
Title: the name of an entertainment product
Four aspects of (brand) names can help consumers draw cognitive inferences
about the brand and trigger emotional responses, which might influence consumer’s
attitudes:
+ Phonetics – certain sounds can trigger reactions
+ Orthography – spelling (unconventional)
+ Morphology – form, shape or structure (font)
+ Semantics – meaning (use a metaphor)
Category/ genre: describes a certain category of entertainment
A genre, is an abstract concept that describes a certain category of entertainment
or art
Any genre evokes imagery in user’s semantic network of associations that is
activated once they hear that an entertainment product belongs to that genre
Associations help us to make quick judgement regarding what to expect, and
whether we might like it
Brand: semantic network of impression in the consumer’s mind
Brands have two key functions:
1) an “awareness function”: a brand can generate immediate attention
2) an “image function”: the semantic network of associations surrounding a brand
provide the basis by which consumers identify with a brand and differentiate the
brand from others
The medium is the message (McLuhan, 1964): the medium influences how the message is
perceived
Form excludes the content (Postman, 1985): A particular medium can only sustain a limited
level of ideas
Suspension of disbelief: justifies the use (and enjoyment) of fantastic or non-realistic
elements in fiction essential for engagement with any kind of fictional narrative
(automatic process)
Experiences
- Immersion indicates the extent to which a medium can deliver an inclusive, extensive,
and vivid illusion of a depicted reality
- Presence is used to describe the degree in which an individual believes to be present in a
virtual environment (user)
