Engineering Customers’ Tranquil Emotions: Plumbing Practitioner Paradoxes and Strategies Professor Cele Otnes, University of Illinois

Event Date: 12 January 2022

Cele Otnes is the Anthony J. Petullo Professor of Business Administration and until recently Head of the Department of Business Administration. She joined the University of Illinois faculty in 1990 and became department head in 2018. Otnes holds a bachelor’s in English literature from Louisiana State University. She earned her MA in advertising from the University of Texas at Austin and PhD in communications from the University of Tennessee. Her research explores how consumers participate in rituals such as gift-giving, holidays, and cultural celebrations at the micro, macro, and marketplace levels.

Abstract:

Tranquility is a distinct, low-arousal positive emotion that helps people sense “all is well with the world” (Smith, Tong, and Ellsworth 2014, 24). Experiencing tranquility affords people the chance to restore and replenish their energy and resilience, two resources that are vital in coping with the increasingly stressful nature of contemporary life. Consumer demand for marketplace offerings that foster tranquility has skyrocketed.

Simultaneously, there is a nascent interest among marketing scholars in how practitioners orchestrate (Higgins and Hamilton 2019) or engineer (Pham and Sun 2020) emotional experiences. We address the topic of emotion engineering from the perspective of practitioners who strategically and tactically craft emotion-laden consumer experiences. We focus on the (neglected) low-arousal positive emotion of tranquility, which is crucially linked to well-being. We explore this topic by plumbing the paradoxes that emerged as practitioners strove to understand and address consumers’ needs for tranquility (e.g., Mick and Fournier 1998; Bitner 2001). Our multi-year, multi-method qualitative study explores two research questions: 

1) Which paradoxes, and the tensions underlying them, prove most challenging for marketing practitioners as they strive to engineer customer tranquility?

2) What strategies do marketers leverage to address these challenges when engineering customer tranquility?

We find that five paradoxes are highly salient for practitioners, and we unpack a variety of strategies they deploy. We also offer normative recommendations to help address practitioners address the paradoxes that make delivering tranquility-laden experiences challenging.

Published: 30 October 2025