Understanding co-consumption between consumers and their pets

Pets live with people; they participate in people's everyday life activities and are often seen as human-like family members. Consumers in the industrialized countries are investing more money in their pets and spending more time with them than ever before. The pet and the owner can even be considered to form a unit that consumes together. In this article, we develop a conceptual understanding of co-consumption by examining how pets act as co-consumers in everyday consumption. The pet owner and pet have joint consumption experiences in which they interact with other actors such as service providers. The consumer (pet owner) consumes because of the pet, meaning that he or she constantly needs to take the pet into account in choices and activities beyond pet-related consumption, such as what kind of car to buy, where to work, whom to marry and how to live. The co-consumer (pet) also acts as an active agent who experiences, feels, suffers and likes the goods and services that the consumer buys for the pet. Reciprocally, the pet provides the consumer (pet owner) with companionship, support and a boost to wellbeing. As such, our research suggests that co-consumption provides an understanding not only of consumption with pets but also of other contexts, especially those in which the aim is shared well-being such as consumption together with children, the disabled or the elderly.

[1]  Jonathan E. Schroeder,et al.  Understanding value co-creation in a co-consuming brand community , 2011 .

[2]  Isabelle Decoopman,et al.  Social comparison motivation of mothers' with their adolescent daughters and its effects on the mother's consumption behaviour , 2013 .

[3]  D. Cook.  The Missing Child in Consumption Theory , 2008 .

[4]  Steve Baron,et al.  Consumers as resource integrators , 2008 .

[5]  Beverly K. Brockman,et al.  The price of unconditional love: Consumer decision making for high-dollar veterinary care , 2008 .

[6]  A. Leffler,et al.  If it weren‘t for my hobby, I'd have a life: dog sports, serious leisure, and boundary negotiations , 2002 .

[7]  Margit Keller,et al.  Pre‐schoolers, parents and supermarkets: co‐shopping as a social practice , 2014 .

[8]  Broadening the Concept of Entrepreneurship: Comparing Business and Consumer Entrepreneurs , 1994 .

[9]  C. Adams,et al.  A focus group study of veterinarians' and pet owners' perceptions of the monetary aspects of veterinary care. , 2007, Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association.

[10]  Craig J Thompson.  Caring Consumers: Gendered Consumption Meanings and the Juggling Lifestyle , 1996 .

[11]  B. Cova,et al.  Market solutions: Breaking free from dyad-centric logic and broadening the scope of S-D L , 2012 .

[12]  M. McEachern,et al.  Extending Holt's consuming typology to encompass subject–subject relations in consumption: lessons from pet ownership , 2012 .

[13]  C. Grönroos.  Value co-creation in service logic: A critical analysis , 2011 .

[14]  The (post-human) consumer, the (post-avian) chicken and the (post-object) Eglu: Towards a material-semiotics of anti-consumption , 2011 .

[15]  Annamari Vänskä.  New kids on the mall: babyfied dogs as fashionable co-consumers , 2014 .

[16]  L. J. Harrison‐Walker.  The Measurement of Word-of-Mouth Communication and an Investigation of Service Quality and Customer Commitment As Potential Antecedents , 2001 .

[17]  Kuang-Peng Hung,et al.  A cluster analysis examination of pet owners’ consumption values and behavior – segmenting owners strategically , 2012 .

[18]  M. McEachern,et al.  A conception of moral sensitivity and everyday consumption practices: insights from the moralizing discourses of pet owners , 2013 .

[19]  Bernard Cova,et al.  Critical perspectives on consumers’ role as ‘producers’: Broadening the debate on value co-creation in marketing processes , 2011 .

[20]  Eva M. Hyatt,et al.  A comparison of dog food choice criteria across dog owner segments: an exploratory study , 2015 .

[21]  Russell W. Belk,et al.  Metaphoric Relationships with Pets , 1996 .

[22]  J. Brace-Govan,et al.  Maternal visibility at the commodity frontier: Weaving love into birthday party consumption , 2014 .

[23]  Karl-Jacob Mickelsson,et al.  Customer activity in service , 2013 .

[24]  Craig J Thompson.  Interpreting Consumers: A Hermeneutical Framework for Deriving Marketing Insights from the Texts of Consumers’ Consumption Stories , 1997 .

[25]  Pet‐related consumption as a consumer identity constructor , 2012 .

[26]  S. Pekkarinen,et al.  The intermediator role in value co-creation within a triadic business service relationship , 2014 .

[27]  E. Hirschman.  Consumers and Their Animal Companions , 1994 .

[28]  S. Bettany,et al.  Figuring companion species consumption: a multi-site ethnography of the post-canine Afghan hound. , 2008 .