A Comparison of Hedonic and Utilitarian Digital Products Based on Consumer Evaluation and Technology Frustration

Abstract

This study explores how hedonic mobile applications (apps) compare to utilitarian apps in consumer evaluation. We posit that achieving a set of passionate consumers is a precursor to product success in markets, whereas technology frustration is a negative hindrance to the product success. Also, we argue that technology frustration may act as a negative complementing factor to consumer passion, and this effect is higher for hedonic products than utilitarian products. We contextualize our study to the android apps, and used a dataset that tracked 19,121 apps in the android market for three months and coded our variables from this dataset. We conducted empirical analysis and found support for our hypotheses. This study contributes to the information systems and marketing literature in providing a new dimension associated with consumer evaluation of digital products, and draws evaluative comparisons between hedonic and utilitarian digital products.

Enhancing the value co-creation process: artificial intelligence and mobile banking service platforms

“…AI service delivery may offer utilitarian (i.e. functional) value by performing secure banking activities (Chang et al , 2016; Hazarika et al , 2019), especially for transaction-oriented tasks such as opening accounts (Jakšič and Marinč, 2019). We theorize that as AI service delivery creates a more efficient customer experience, consumers will need to spend fewer operant resources (skills and knowledge) on navigating the digital channel or app, shifting some of the operant resource expenditure back to the financial institution.…”

Trialing or combining? Understanding consumer partial switching in mobile application usage from the variety seeking perspective

“…The hedonic apps were defined as pleasure-oriented apps, which aim to provide self-fulfilling value and would bring on feelings of pleasure, and perhaps sometimes guilt when using these apps. The utilitarian apps were defined as goal-oriented apps, which aim to provide instrumental value, and no guilt and relatively little pleasure are brought when using these apps (Hazarika et al , 2019; Heijden, 2004; Strahilevitz and Myers, 1998). The results are reported in Table 2, which shows that all the 12 app categories can be clearly distinguished.…”

“…First, app type (i.e., hedonic app vs. utilitarian app) is taken as a control variable. This is because previous studies suggested that consumer variety seeking may vary between hedonic and utilitarian products (Baltas et al , 2017; Lin, 2014), and mobile apps can be classified as hedonic or utilitarian (Hazarika et al , 2019). Second, we included three individual characteristics (i.e., gender, age, education level) and two variables related to app usage (i.e., use experience and average use frequency toward an app category) as control variables, since they are common factors that may affect different IS use behaviors.…”