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Context Is Everything: Facilitating Fit When New Products Are Ambiguous, Theodore J. Noseworthy
Context Is Everything: Facilitating Fit When New Products Are Ambiguous, Theodore J. Noseworthy
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Researchers have long believed that consumers adjust their functional expectations in accordance with a product’s physical appearance. Recently this belief has come under fire. Product categories are converging rapidly. Take modern cell phones; the physical appearance of the iPhone is only tangentially related to the breadth of its functionality. Examples like this have sparked a wealth of interest in exploring how consumers generate inferences for products with functions that span multiple categories. One important finding is that consumers tend to generate functional inferences based mainly on the knowledge of a single category. This suggests that new hybrid products are not …