Various organisations strive to provide emotional consumer experiences in order to stay competitive. Meanwhile, individuals’ interest in their health and well-being has increased significantly, creating new markets for, e.g. self-tracking technologies. Both trends are related to the increasing economic affluence and leisure time, demographic shifts, and changes in values and lifestyles. According to experiential marketing, consumers no longer simply buy commodities but express their personality through consumption habits. Additionally, consumption has become a culturally accepted means of seeking happiness, well-being, and quality-of-life. But as the relationship between materialism and well-being is questioned, consumption often focuses on non-material well-being, self-development, and experiences.

Experiences employ a unique combination of cognitive and emotive processes. Recently, the emotional characteristics have been emphasized as the attention has shifted from the idea of experiences as displayed objects provided by the industry to the consumers’ subjective negotiations of meanings. However, regardless of their emotionality, consumer experiences are still often measured with mainly cognitive measures (quality, satisfaction, value). Even specific experience scales seem to be just extensions of these traditional methods and, thus, too limited for capturing the holistic nature of experiences. Consequently, there is a need for developing alternative methods for evaluating experiences.

Previous studies have examined emotions in relation to consumer experiences, but this study introduces a new method for facilitating this task. Emotion Tracker® is an easy-to-use application for identifying and analyzing emotions. The paper discusses how this self-tracking technology could be integrated in research practices to enhance understanding of emotional consumer experiences in various contexts.