Technological progress has been enabling companies to add disparate features to
their existing products. This research investigates the effect of adding more features
on consumers’ evaluation of the product, by examining in particular the role of the
congruity of the features added with the base product as a variable the moderates the
effect of increasing the number of features. Grounding on schema-congruity theory, I
propose that the cognitive elaboration associated with the product congruity of the
features added explains consumers’ evaluation as the number of new features
increases. In particular, it is shown that consumers perceive a benefit from increasing
the number of features only when these features are congruent with the product. The
underlying mechanisms that explains this finding predicts that when the number of
incongruent features increases the cognitive resources necessary to elaborate such
incongruities increase and consumers are not willing to spend such resources.
However, I further show that when encouraged to consider the new features
thoughtfully, consumers do seem able to infer value from increasing the number of
moderately incongruent features. Nonetheless, this finding does not apply for those
new features that are extremely incongruent with the product. Further evidence for
consumers’ ability to resolve the moderate incongruity associated with adding more
features is also shown, by studying the moderating role of temporal construal. I
propose that consumers perceive an increase in product evaluation as the number of
moderately incongruent features increases when consumers consider purchasing the
product in the distant future, whereas such an increase is not predicted for the near
future scenario. I verify these effect in three experimental studies. Theoretical and
managerial implications, and possible avenues of future research are also suggested.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:unibo.it/oai:amsdottorato.cib.unibo.it:1159 |
| Date | 04 June 2008 |
| Creators | De Angelis, Matteo <1982> |
| Contributors | Marcati, Alberto |
| Publisher | Alma Mater Studiorum - Università di Bologna |
| Source Sets | Università di Bologna |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Doctoral Thesis, PeerReviewed |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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