Looks Interesting, but what does it Do? Evaluation of Incongruent Product form Depends on Positioning

Abstract

Marketers struggle with how best to position innovative products that are incongruent with consumer expectations. Compounding the issue, many incongruent products are the result of innovative changes in product form intended to increase hedonic appeal. Crossing various product categories with various positioning tactics in a single meta-analytic framework, the authors find that positioning plays an important role in how consumers evaluate incongruent form. The results demonstrate that when a product is positioned on functional dimensions, consumers show more preferential evaluations for moderately incongruent form than for congruent form. However, when a product is positioned on experiential dimensions, consumers show more preferential evaluations for congruent form than for moderately incongruent form. Importantly, an increase in perceived hedonic benefits mediates the former, whereas a decrease in perceived utilitarian benefits mediates the latter. The mediation effects are consistent with the view that consumers must first understand a product's functionality before engaging in hedonic consumption.

Evoking premiumness: How color-product congruency influences premium evaluations

“…As articulated by Okada (2005), one needs to "earn the right to indulge." This notion is transferable to product design (Noseworthy & Trudel, 2011). We advance the literature on congruence and incongruence (Meyers-Levy & Tybout, 1989;Peracchio & Tybout, 1996;Stayman et al, 1992) by suggesting that the mechanism explains how color and marketing message congruence and incongruence may create premium associations.…”

“…A study by Noseworthy and Trudel (2011) helps resolve the ambiguity provided by these seemingly contradictory theories. They suggest that a utilitarian versus a hedonic product positioning would moderate consumers' tendency to prefer congruence or incongruence.…”

“…Accordingly, Noseworthy and Trudel (2011) suggested that for hedonic products, a moderately incongruent product design is not beneficial because incongruence causes consumers to perceive less utilitarian benefits. This explanation applies for our findings as well.…”

When Two Wrongs Make a Right: Using Conjunctive Enablers to Enhance Evaluations for Extremely Incongruent New Products

“…Consistent with the literature on schema congruity, we define an extremely incongruent product as being so atypical of the category that people struggle to resolve it within an existing set of beliefs, and, consequently, the product suffers negative evaluations (Jhang et al 2012;Meyers-Levy et al 1994;Meyers-Levy and Tybout 1989;Noseworthy et al 2014;Noseworthy and Trudel 2011;Peracchio and Tybout 1996;Stayman et al 1992).…”

The effect of information regarding multi-attributes on consumers' choices of GM products

“…Motivation may be increased when consumers are exposed to new information incongruent with prior beliefs. While incongruity increases attention and cognitive resources -which are allocated to resolving the cognitive conflict, thereby resulting in stronger memorizing and higher accessibility -incongruity also increases uncertainty (Noseworthy and Trudel, 2011). Health hazards and uncertainty are likely to change the choice mechanism to a systematic one (Chaiken, 1980;Zuckerman and Chaiken, 1988) that considers the tradeoff between attributes (Heiman and Lowengart, 2008).…”