What is experiential consumption? In order to understand what this important construct is nowadays in the marketing literature, we need to go back to 1982 when Hirschman and Holbrook wrote a pillar of the marketing literature describing the consumer as an individual who needs to realize him or herself through, not functional needs, but experiential needs: that is pleasure, that is fun, that is excitement. We are surrounded by examples of museums, sports, entertainment, and vacations, where we don't die if we don't buy a holiday to a specific place on Earth, we don't die if we don't enter a museum or if we see this beautiful experience nowadays. Theses are kinds of needs that are not the basic needs of the consumer. We buy the experience and we want to live this kind of experience in order to fulfill our deeper needs. After what we've just said, We can make a proper comparison about the utilitaristic perspective of consumption and the experiential perspective of the consumption. The utilitaristic perspective is we buy something because have a functional need to satisfy. The utilitaristic perspective is we buy something because have a functional need to satisfy. The experiential of consumption is because we want to leave a huge and broader aspect of consumption. The utilitaristic consumption and the perspective therefore consider the consumer completely irrational. He buys because he needs, he purchases and at the end he expresses satisfaction or dissatisfaction. On the other side, the experiential consumption considers the consumer not only the rational, but also endowed with emotions and feelings. In the utilitaristic perspective, we can describe the decision making process of the consumer using the acronym ICABS: Five steps that describe, step-by-step, what the starting point of the consumption experience is and arriving to the end, what the expression of satisfaction is. The process starts with I: Information. Information is starting to realize to have a need. I start realizing there are many alternatives on the market, and I pick some characteristics that are very important for my choice. So, I do a sort of exploratory search of what is present on the market regarding a specific need. Cognition: The Second Step Cognition describes the moment where the consumer realizes that there are some alternatives more important than others, he orders, in a way, the alternatives. Affect is when the consumer expresses his affection and he expressed his own idea and his own preferences after having collected and ranked them. Then we have the fourth step of behavior. Behavior's when we act, we express our behavior. We go to the shop and buy the product that we chose. We, after having ranked the alternatives, at least into the preference, it's expressed our own ideas. And preferences we decide to buy and that's the moment of behavior in the ICABS model. And the fifth one is the satisfaction. After our purchase, we can be happy, unhappy, satisfied, unsatisfied, in this last part, it's the only moment that can be in a way go back and start at the beginning the relation. Because we are not satisfied of the very product we eventually bought. Of course this process, the ICABS process of decision making is endowed with many limits. If we consider what we have just said about the relationship between the utilitaristic perspective and experiential perspective, we consider in the ICABS model, the total absence of emotions, the environment, ambiance, and of course mediation. There is no mediation in the ICABS model. And this is the biggest limit of this approach in the consumer behavior. After having understood that the ICABS model, which is linear, which has a lot of limits, that doesn't consider the emotions that are playing an important role, we arrive to a definition of a whole process of consumption. Arnould in 2002 stated that the consumption experience consists of four different elements that start before the purchase, Even before the act of going to the shop and buying: The pre-purchase experience. When we start dreaming of something that we would like to see and to buy, when we start looking forward to having the experience of going to a concert, six months before we buy the ticket, when we start thinking of the beautiful masterpiece that we're going to see in the Louvre, or in the most secluded part of the world for holiday. This is the pre-purchase experience. Then we have the purchase, the very moment of buying the ticket, entering the museum with the ticket, and going to the ticket office. Buying the concert and entering the theater to listen to it, and this is leading us to the third step. After these two moments of the pre-purchase consumption and the purchase experience, we are now in the consumption experience itself. When we have, in our hands, the product. We consume it, We enjoy it, and in some cases, this moment is later than the purchase. In some other cases, the urchase and consumption are at the same moment of time. Just consider when you went to a museum, or you go to the cinema. You pay the ticket and you immediately enter the cinema. When you buy something and you pay, you enter a shop and have a tailor made suit, for example. You need to wait for a while in order consume and wear it on your body. So the consumption experience is the very core of the construct of experiential consumption. When we realize we are enjoying, we are having fun, pleasure of the goods that we have in our hands. And after this step, which is very important, we arrive to the fourth one, which is the post consumption experience. In this moment we want to maintain, retain the importance and the beauty and the pleasure we lived during the experience, even later. This is the reason why we take pictures when we go on holiday, that we buy souvenirs when we enter a museum or we ask for an autograph when we see a celebrity that we really like. utilitaristic perspective linear approach in decision making. ICABS: Information, cognition behavior, affect and satisfaction. And in the experiential perspective, we have something different. The element of consumption consists of four steps: Pre-purchase, purchase, consumption, and post-consumption. What drives customer experience? What is the value creator and generator in the experience consumption? For sure it's the element of interaction when we as consumers, because we want to live an experience, give value the more engaging is the relation, the more unique is the relation the product of the consumption. And the interaction of the service of the product that we have in front of us. So we have in this case many elements that are playing an important role the offer, the market, the characteristic of the product for sure, But above all the contact between the characteristic of the product and our personal traits, our knowledge, our feelings. And together the stimulation that comes from outside and our own aspect and our own challenge in the experience generating creates the value that leads to the overall satisfaction and overall value that we give to the moment that we are living in.