Highly innovative products may offer consumers greater benefits than incrementally new products, yet they have a higher failure rate. The current research addresses the challenge faced by new products that are extremely different from existing offerings by drawing on theory regarding the evaluation of schema incongruity. The authors posit that consumers' acceptance of extremely incongruent products will increase when firms use strategies that facilitate cognitive flexibility and thus the likelihood that consumers will be able to make sense of incongruent new products. The authors examine the influence of three manipulations of cognitive flexibility-positive affect, a future (vs. past) launch description, and a cognitive flexibility prime-on evaluations of new products. The results from four experiments show that these factors facilitate participants' ability to make sense of extremely incongruent new products and that incongruity resolution leads to more positive evaluations. The results also indicate that understanding the benefits provided by extremely new products, rather than affect arising from resolution, leads to higher evaluations of these products.
There is no worse time to be interrupted than right now. Being close to attaining a goal to complete a focal task increases the attractiveness of that task compared to an interrupting task (study 1), makes people less willing to take on some otherwise attractive interruption than if they were farther away from completion (studies 2, 3, and 4), and causes them to perceive that in that moment they have little spare time (studies 3 and 4). Consumers immersed in goal pursuit are affected by local progress on an individual subgoal that supports an overarching goal even if this has no effect on the timing of attaining the overarching goal. Observers do not appreciate the motivating power of proximity to completing subgoals, and this leads them to mispredict the behavior of others (study 5).
The pandemic outbreak poses one of the most influential threats. When faced with such a threat, consumers engage in adaptive behaviors, and one way to do so may pertain to pattern-seeking in their choices. Across five studies, we show that consumers exhibit patterns in sequential choice under the threat of COVID-19. Specifically, consumers high (vs. low) in the perceived threat increase sequential patterns in repeated choice regardless of whether the levels of the perceived threat are measured or manipulated. The effect emerges even when a patterned choice option is objectively inferior to a nonpatterned option. The underlying mechanism of the effect is that consumers experience a lower sense of control, which motivates them to seek patterned choices to regain control threatened by the infectious disease. We further show that the effect on patterned choice is stronger for consumers with lower childhood socioeconomic status (SES), who are characterized by a lower sense of control, than their higher childhood SES counterparts. Noting that infectious disease threats are unavoidable, we offer theoretical contributions as well as novel insights into marketing practices under unpredictable and threatening situations.
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