As technology advances, it becomes more feasible to load products with a large number of features, each of which individually might be perceived as useful. However, too many features can make a product overwhelming for consumers and difficult to use. Three studies examine how consumers balance their desires for capability and usability when they evaluate products and how these desires shift over time. Because consumers give more weight to capability and less weight to usability before use than after use, they tend to choose overly complex products that do not maximize their satisfaction when they use them, resulting in ”feature fatigue.” An analytical model based on these results provides additional insights into the feature fatigue effect. This model shows that choosing the number of features that maximizes initial choice results in the inclusion of too many features, potentially decreasing customer lifetime value. As the emphasis on future sales increases, the optimal number of features decreases. The results suggest that firms should consider having a larger number of more specialized products, each with a limited number of features, rather than loading all possible features into one product.

Research in marketing often begins with two assumptions: that consumers are able to choose among desirable products, and that they have sufficient resources to buy them. However, many consumer decision journeys are constrained by a scarcity of products and/or a scarcity of resources. We review research in marketing, psychology, economics and sociology to construct an integrative framework outlining how these different types of scarcity individually and jointly influence consumers at various stages of their decision journeys. We outline avenues for future research and discuss implications for developing consumer-based marketing strategies.

Companies increasingly involve consumers in the process of developing advertising and other marketing actions. An important question that has not been explored is whether brands benefit from communicating to consumers who had not been involved in the co-creation process that a target ad was developed by a fellow consumer. The authors propose a skepticism–identification model of ad creator influence, which hypothesizes that disclosing to an audience that an ad was created by a consumer triggers two opposing effects: skepticism about the competence of the ad creator and identification with the ad creator. Four studies demonstrate that the effectiveness of disclosing advertising co-creation depends on factors that hinder skepticism and heighten identification with the ad creator. Specifically, attributing the ad to a consumer is shown to increase persuasion when the audience (1) has limited cognitive resources to scrutinize the message, (2) is given background information about the ad creator that enhances source similarity, and (3) has high loyalty toward the brand. The implications of these findings on marketing theory and practice are discussed.

We demonstrate that matching ad format to a consumer's mode of information processing enhances advertising effectiveness. Relative to noncomparative ads, comparative ads are more effective when consumers use analytical processing. Conversely, noncomparative ads are more effective than comparative ads when consumers use imagery processing. When ad format is compatible with processing mode, information processability is enhanced, making the message more persuasive and ad evaluations, brand evaluations, and purchase intentions more favorable than when ad format and processing mode are incompatible.

We show that direct product experiences (e.g., product trials) and indirect product experiences (e.g., reading a product description) result in different levels of mental construal and product preferences. Study 1 demonstrates that increasing experiential contact with a product triggers more concrete mental construal and increases preferences for products that are easy to use relative to those that are more desirable but difficult to use. Studies 2 and 3 show that the effect of product experience can be attenuated by encouraging consumers to think concretely prior to product exposure and by asking consumers to choose products for others instead of themselves. (c) 2007 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..