“Worth Every Penny” Experiential Value and Price Justification in Premium Fitness Consumption

Sammanfattning

As experiential business models expand, understanding how consumers constructvalue beyond functional outcomes is becoming increasingly relevant to research on premiumservice consumption. Consequently, our study examines how consumers experience value inpremium fitness consumption and how this value justifies price premiums. By using aqualitative study design based on eleven semi-structured interviews, our study describes thelived meanings consumers attach to premium fitness experiences across hedonic, eudaimonic,and social dimensions. Our study shows that experiential value in this context is not deliveredthrough the service itself but constructed through participation, social interaction, and identityrelevance, and that price justification is not a pre-purchase judgment but a retrospectiveprocess shaped by the meanings that emerge in use. The insights contribute to research onexperiential consumption and service pricing by showing how price premiums are justifiedthrough non-functional meanings accumulated across repeated engagement, extendingexisting frameworks that treat value and price justification as primarily functional or episodicevaluations.