There and Back Again: Bleed from Extraordinary Experiences

Abstract From reenactments to pilgrimages, extraordinary experiences engage consumers with frames and roles that govern their actions for the duration of experience. Exploring such roles, however, can make act returning everyday life more difficult, a process prior research leaves implicit. The present ethnography live action role-playing explains how return from this differs depending on consumers’ subjectivity. emic term “bleed” captures trace leave in life. subjective tension between ordinary intensifies bleed. Consumers same experience thus suffer different bleed intensities, charting four trajectories differ potential transformation: absent, compensatory, cathartic, delayed. These findings lead transformative recursive model offers new insights into whether, how, why transformed broader implications experiential consumption marketing.