It’s Too Pretty to Use! When and How Enhanced Product Aesthetics Discourage Usage and Lower Consumption Enjoyment

Abstract

Marketers invest a lot of resources in product aesthetics and design, but does this strategy always lead to favorable consumer outcomes? While prior research suggests enhanced aesthetics should have a uniformly positive influence on pre-usage evaluations and choice, the present research examines the downstream effects of nondurable product aesthetics on consumption behavior and post-consumption affect. First, we document an inhibiting effect of aesthetics on actual consumption. We find that highly aesthetic products elicit greater perceptions of effort in their creation, and that consumers have an intrinsic appreciation for such effort. Because the consumption process indirectly destroys the effort invested to make the product beautiful, people reduce consumption of such products because usage would entail destroying something they naturally appreciate. Second, we show that in cases where individuals do consume a beautiful product, they exhibit lower consumption enjoyment and increased negative affect. These negative post-consumption outcomes are mediated in parallel by concerns over having actually destroyed the effort that made the product beautiful as well as the decrements in beauty that become visible when aesthetic products are made less attractive through consumption. Across a series of studies, we challenge the common assumption that enhanced aesthetics always lead to positive consumer outcomes.

Beauty, Effort, and Misrepresentation: How Beauty Work Affects Judgments of Moral Character and Consumer Preferences

“…Our findings that certain types of effortful beauty work are viewed negatively contrast with prior work that largely reveals consumers' appreciation of the effort that others put into specific products or displays (Kruger et al 2004;Morales 2005). Recent work on nondurable goods (e.g., cupcakes, napkins) has even shown that people value beautiful products precisely because of the effort that went into creating them (Wu et al 2017). Interestingly, people have the opposite intuitions when considering the effort exerted to achieve an attractive physical appearance because such effort is seen as dishonest.…”

“…Still, research has not investigated how effort related to improving one's appearance is perceived or its implications for consumption. While prior work has focused largely on consumers' appreciation of their own and others' effort pertaining to products, gifts, and displays (Cutright and Samper 2014;Kruger et al 2004;Morales 2005;Moreau, Bonney, and Herd 2011;Wu et al 2017), we examine how and why exerting effort on beauty work can negatively affect judgments of moral character.…”

The Sacred Power of Beauty: Examining the Perceptual Effect of Buddhist Symbols on Happiness and Life Satisfaction in China

“…We measured the aesthetic effect of the Buddhist symbols using a 6-item Likert scale adapted from the related literature [115]. In this study, the visual aesthetics were emphasized (''This Buddhist symbol looks attractive/ beautiful/ artistic/ pretty/ aesthetically appealing/ arousing'', 1 = Strongly In order to control for these co-founding factors, we ran two pilot studies to explore whether the meaning of the adapted symbol is consistent with the original one and whether this symbol could elicit higher happiness compared with the control group.…”

“…We measured the aesthetic effect of the Buddhist symbols using a 6-item Likert scale adapted from the related literature [115]. In this study, the visual aesthetics were emphasized ("This Buddhist symbol looks attractive/ beautiful/ artistic/ pretty/ aesthetically appealing/ arousing", 1 = Strongly Disagree, 5 = Strongly Agree).…”

Towards the Beauty of Buddhism: The Development and Validation of a Buddhist Aesthetics Scale

“…First of all, three major streams of relevant research were reviewed: the theoretical work of the centrality of visual aesthetics and perceived aesthetics from a psychological perspective (Workman and Caldwell 2007;Bloch et al 2003;Wu et al 2017;Lee and Koubek 2010;Hekkert et al 2017), the explicit aesthetics of Buddhist items (Inada 1994;Schopen 2006), as well as religious aesthetics literature, especially the religious aesthetics of items and symbols from a sensory perspective (Meyer 2010(Meyer , 2006Prohl 2010). Then, 42 college students at a major university in the eastern part of China were recruited to describe their experience and feelings when viewing Buddhism items or symbols.…”