Harmful Effects of Mental Imagery and Customer Orientation During New Product Screening

Abstract

One of the traditional tenets of marketing is that managers considering whether to develop and launch a new product should adopt a customer orientation and consider whether the product would satisfy the needs of customers. This research discovers that adopting a customer orientation causes managers to experience undesirable cognitive effects. The authors find that when considering customers’ needs during the screening phase of the new product development process, managers often voluntarily engage in mental imagery (i.e., cognitive simulation) that biases their evaluation of a new product idea toward unrealistic optimism—even for a flawed product that would not satisfy customer needs. Furthermore, the authors find that managers who exert greater vigilance to achieve more accurate evaluations of the new product idea are especially vulnerable to the biasing effect, leading to less accurate evaluations. The authors test an analytical technique (i.e., a theory-based approach to analyzing the new product) that successfully allows a manager to adopt a customer orientation without an attendant bias toward optimism.

A Review of Sensory Imagery for Consumer Psychology

“…Imagery as a prospective process has direct application to new product development, wherein the product has yet to be created. Relevant research has examined how imagery impacts new product design (Dahl, Chattopadhyay, & Gorn, 1999;Zhao et al, 2009), new product creativity (Herd & Mehta, 2019), as well as projected success of new products introduced to the market (DeRosia & Elder, 2019).…”

“…But, note that while most research recommends taking a consumer orientation when developing new products, this imagery can also have a downside (DeRosia & Elder, 2019). Focusing on the consumer during the screening phase of new product development has the consequence of managers engaging in mental imagery of the consumers interacting with the product.…”

“…Future research should explore how the process of imagery formation influences managers. For example, it is possible that images that are easy to generate will lead to increased overconfidence, such as that shown by DeRosia and Elder (2019). The fluency of imagery generation from managers or consumers may lead to important marketing consequences.…”

“…Another potential area for future research is exploring the negative consequences of imagery. Imagery does not always impact consumer perceptions positively (DeRosia & Elder, 2019; Elder & Krishna, 2012; Lin, Cross, Laczniak, et al., 2018). Imagining a negative scenario in great detail likely increases the perceived likelihood of that event occurring (Rajagopal & Montgomery, 2011), and possibly even creates affectively negative false memories.…”

The art and science of systemic wellness in Black communities: Qualitative evaluation of a multimodal theatrical production

“…Affective processing deals with feeling, or understanding emotions (Badoud et al, 2017). Building off the aforementioned components, mental imagery is ‘the cognitive process of representing sensory information and cause-and-effect simulations in working memory’ (DeRosia and Elder, 2019: 639); in a way it is a visualisation of mental data from the cognitive and affective experience. Because this imagery is being enacted mentally, the representational content is perceived in a state of imagined presence (Hutto, 2015).…”