Consumers’ perception of relatedness in mental representations of products

Abstract

The work in this thesis investigates relatedness (as perceived by consumers) in mental representations of products. Just as other objects that are part of the physical world, products are represented in consumers’ minds in the form of concepts. Concepts hold consumers’ knowledge about a product. They consist of sets of features (concrete and abstract attributes) and relations (linkages between features). A key assumption of this thesis is that consumers gain additional information based on the numerous linkages between features. Such relatedness information is relevant to consumers as it allows them to draw important inferences about a product and to more accurately assess its value. Chapter 1 serves to ground the notion of relatedness in concept theories. The empirical chapters that follow investigate the notion of relatedness from multiple perspectives. Chapter 2 highlights the relevance of relatedness between features in new product combinations. Specifically, it shows that consumers account for relatedness in their reasoning about products and that inferences based on such relatedness influence product value. Furthermore, feature relatedness appears to be particularly relevant in product combinations with radically (as opposed to incrementally) new feature additions. Chapter 3 expands on these results by showing that relatedness is not only found in product features, but also in consumers’ consumption goals, that is, the abstract benefits consumers seek in a consumption context. Relatedness between goals is found to be a significant predictor of product value in addition to mere congruence (or similarity) between goals. Chapter 4 highlights yet another aspect of relatedness. It shows how even subtle visual cues can be used to prime relatedness in mental representations. Specifically, it shows how the use of crosshairs (instead of plain circles) in a map to indicate hotspots of a fox plague can result in shaping participants’ attitudes in a more violent direction. This last result is also relevant in a broader context as it shows how the design of a product can influence which properties of mental representations consumers will account for and perceive as related. Chapter 5 is about the effects of external factors—namely, physical activity, time pressure, and provision of brand cues—on the processing of product-related information. Specifically, it shows how these factors can put consumers in either one of two cognitive systems, intuitive System 1, or deliberate System 2 (Kahneman, 2003; Stanovich & West, 2000) and how that can influence consumers’ evaluations of feature additions in products. Chapter 6 continues on the idea of two distinct cognitive systems in the context of attitude measurement. Specifically, it introduces the multi-dimensional Implicit Association Test (md-IAT), a procedural extension of the Implicit Association Test (Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998). The md-IAT allows for the measurement of brand attitudes based on consumers’ multi- dimensional implicit associations—that is, how they reveal themselves to the more intuitive System 1. Chapter 7 concludes with a discussion of the thesis’ main findings, its theoretical contribution, managerial implications, and limitations and suggestions for future research.