Sensing physical properties for subjective meanings: Putting Emergent Consumer Perceived Value (ECPV) into the marketers’ toolbox

Abstract Marketers need to understand consumers in both theory and practice to create offerings that are valuable to them. Hence, the marketing discipline has conceptualized consumers’ subjectively perceived value in various ways, using multiple paradigms. Nevertheless, its constituents remain unclear. We argue that this is because the ontological and epistemological premises are both vague and narrow. Consequently, consumers’ value perceptions are still difficult to study or manage. With the aim of making a conceptual leap, our paper is the first to apply a critical realist (CR) approach to the phenomenon. CR’s stratified ontology and subjectivist/pluralist epistemology reconcile the positivist and interpretivist/constructionist paradigms, allowing the simultaneous existence of external socio-natural and internal subjective realities. Using these premises, we examine, from a marketer’s perspective, how consumers perceive value, which is a subjective, phenomenological, and socially constructed act embedded in the natural world. Our CR theorizing deploys Bhaskar’s (2010) RRREIC schema and includes a review of the extant subjective value conceptualizations (consumer perceived value, value-in-use, value-in-experience) and retroduction of the key mechanisms generating the phenomenon: meaning-making and sensory perception. Finally, we propose a novel conceptualization for Emergent Consumer Perceived Value formation (ECPV) as an open system. As its integral component, we introduce the concept of Sensory Value Affordance, explaining how consumers transform physical properties into subjective meanings. These conceptual tools cater especially to B2C managers and account for both the phenomenological and sociocultural as well as the corporeal and perceptual. Finally, we present broader implications for value research, the field of marketing, and society.