Moving away from the "lived experience" and towards the "living experience" : gathering insights for consumer culture theory

![CDATA[The premise of consumer culture research is to add to our understanding of the vibrant relationships between consumer actions, the marketplace and cultural meanings (Arnould and Thompson, 2005). This is mostly achieved via the application of interpretivist methods where consumers report back on their experiences and create narratives that present insights into their lives or bring others and communities into their realities. Yet, in the process of becoming a recognisable subdiscipline of consumer research, this field of study is at risk of becoming more deductive if the researcher sets out to validate a proposition within a specific empirical setting, potentially limiting the uncovering of unexpected insights (Belk and Sobh, 2018). We propose that with current improvements in data collection technology, consumer culture theory researchers should consider opportunities to engage with the “living experience” of participants. In other words, engaging with consumers at the time of their experience and thus extending the premise of the customary “lived experience”. This ideally extends our ability to gather data as it occurs and aids in our understanding of the phenomenon under study.]]