Consumers are known to love variety. But does this mean that we prefer products that can be used in different situations? Rather, the opposite is true: the universal product causes our dissatisfaction more often.
Jordan Etkin of Duke University and Aner Sela of the University of Florida came to this conclusion as a result of a series of studies that focused on the use of various consumer products.1.
In most of the studies, the authors examined how the variety of uses of a product affected customer satisfaction, product rating, and the likelihood of recommending it to others. For example, in the case of sneakers, it was found out whether shoppers use them only for walking — walking the dog, going to the store and to work — or whether they wear these shoes also in other cases, for example, when flying on an airplane or doing home repairs.
In each case, the same pattern was found — when a person believed that a product had many different uses, he liked it less. When a product had only one use, it seemed to its owner that he constantly uses it and gets a lot of benefit from it. The use of a product in different situations usually did not psychologically add up to a single picture, and it seemed to the consumer that the product was rarely used.
“Marketers should draw practical conclusions from these results. For example, by asking a consumer to remember «use of a product in various situations», we may inadvertently make him feel that he rarely uses this item, and as a result he will give it a low rating. Conversely, contrary to popular belief, if advertising focuses on the constant use of an object or device in its main function, it is quite possible that those who have already used this thing will want to buy it again in the future,” the authors of the study sum up.
1 J. Etkin, A. Sela «How Experience Variety Shapes Post-Purchase Product Evaluation», Journal of Marketing Research, 2015 (in press).