The “Right” Consumers for the Best Concepts: A Methodology for Identifying Emergent
Consumers for New Product Development
Donna L. Hoffman
Praveen K. Kopalle
Thomas P. Novak*
Paper presented at ACR 2008
Donna L Hoffman is the Chancellor’s Chair and Professor of Marketing at the A. Gary Anderson
Graduate School of Management, 900 University Avenue, University of California, Riverside,
Riverside, CA 92521; Ph 951-827-4848; Fax 951-827-3970; Donna.hoffman@ucr.edu
Praveen Kopalle is associate professor of business administration and faculty associate, Center
for Digital Strategies at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, Dartmouth College, Hanover,
NH 03755; Ph: 603-646-3612, Fax: 603-646-1308, Praveen.kopalle@dartmouth.edu.
Thomas P. Novak is the Albert O. Steffey Professor of Marketing at the A. Gary Anderson
Graduate School of Management, 900 University Avenue, University of California, Riverside,
Riverside, CA 92521; Ph 951-827-4999; Fax 951-827-3970; tom.novak@ucr.edu
*The authors thank David Porter, an entrepreneur and the inventor of SmartBox, a patented
storage device for the delivery and pickup of goods (U.S. Pat. #5,774,053), for permission to use
the SmartBox descriptions in this research.
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The “Right” Consumers for the Best Concepts: A Methodology for Identifying Emergent
Consumers for New Product Development
LONG ABSTRACT
Consumer firms are generally interested in learning which consumers might be the
"right" ones they might use to further develop product concepts and improve their chances for
success in the marketplace. Which consumers are the most appropriate to engage in the product
development process is important because while new product development is a major activity of
firms (Chandy and Tellis 1998), most of the 25,000 products introduced in the United States
each year fail (Goldenberg, Lehmann, and Mazursky 2001). While much research has
emphasized improving current new product concept techniques (e.g. Dahan and Hauser 2002;
Dahl and Moreau 2002; Green, Krieger, and Vavra 1997), except for the lead user approach (von
Hippel 1986), little work has focused on which consumers to use in the new product
development process, particularly in the consumer goods industry.
We propose such a methodology to identify these “right” consumers. We argue that the
right consumers possess what we call an “emergent nature,” i.e., the ability to process
information in a synergistically experiential and rational thinking style, and exhibit a unique set
of personality traits such that interactions among them in a new product development context
will produce a product that mainstream consumers would find more appealing and useful relative
to one that is developed by mainstream or even innovative consumers. We draw on information
processing theory to develop the emergent nature construct and test our hypotheses in four
studies.
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A considerable body of research in dual-processing theory has differentiated among two
types of information processing styles: experiential thinking style and rational thinking style (e.g.
Epstein 1994; Pacini & Epstein 1999; Sloman 1996; Smith and DeCoster 2000) and
substantiated the existence of individual differences in these two thinking styles (Epstein,
Pancini, Denes-Raj, and Heier 1996; Pancini and Epstein 1999; Norris and Epstein 2003a,
2003b). Rational thinking style involves goal-directed, active, logical processing, and permits
consumers to make optimal judgments about the utility of adopting a particular product
innovation. Experiential thinking style, on the other hand, involves holistic, emotional,
associative processing. Immediate experience is critical for experiential thinking, while logic
and evidence are critical for rational thinking. The two thinking styles are not mutually
exclusive processing styles; empirically they tend to have a very small positive correlation.
Epstein and his colleagues have shown that these two processing styles reliably relate to a variety
of psychological constructs (e.g. Pacini & Epstein 1999), with rational thinking style appearing
to be adaptive for good judgment in specific decision-making situations, and an experiential style
adaptive for interactions and creative pursuits.
Novak and Hoffman (2007) suggest that some tasks “might demonstrate synergistic
effects” in which both experiential and rational situation-specific thinking style might correlate
positively with performance. We propose that consumers with an emergent nature are high in
both experiential and rational thinking style and are able to use the two thinking styles in a
synergistic manner. That is, we argue that emergent nature is defined largely by the
complementary interaction between the experiential and rational thinking styles.
We propose that emergent consumers, owing to the synergies among their thinking styles,
are able to engage successfully in both idea generation to enhance the original concept and
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logical analysis to refine and develop the concept further. In other words, emergent consumers
are able to synergistically apply intuition and judgment to improve product concepts. Consumers
with a high emergent nature develop an intuitive, almost “instinctive” understanding, i.e.,
visualizing the latent uses of a new product, through a sequence of small scale, affective, and
associative perceptions. They are able to generate these ideas focused on the future because they
possess a high degree of experiential processing ability. The experiential system generates the
“gut feelings” underlying the intuitive understanding of the potential usefulness of a new product
concept. Following this automatic, associative stage, emergent consumers, owing to their high
degree of rational processing ability, then employ a rational thinking style in a conscious, logical
and analytic effort to evaluate and refine the concept. In our conceptualization, the thinking
styles work together in a complementary and iterative fashion, where a rational effort to analyze
a product concept may activate further implicit, experiential associations about that concept,
followed by another round of rational analysis, and so on. The essence of emergent nature is that
consumers so possessed are able to inform their experiential impressions and associations with
rational evaluation and judgment and vice versa.
The results from Study 1, a comprehensive calibration and validation phase involving
scale development and construct measurement, provide strong support for the idea that emergent
nature is a useful construct in the product development context. We have developed a highly
reliable and valid scale to measure emergent nature in consumers and showed that the emergent
nature construct is empirically distinct from other product development constructs such as lead
user status, as well as dispositional innovativeness (Steenkamp and Gielens 2003).
In study 2, five mutually exclusive groups of consumers, including those high on
emergent nature, lead user status, and dispositional innovativeness, develop a new product
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concept using an online bulletin board methodology, and in studies 3 and 4, those concepts are
market tested demonstrating that consumers high on emergent nature can develop product
concepts that are perceived by typical consumers as significantly better than concepts developed
by groups high on domain-specific lead user status or dispositional innovativeness.
The strong showing of the concept developed by the high lead user group reinforces
research that argues that lead users represent a good segment for developing radical new product
concepts (von Hippel 1986). It also provides strong face validity to our results. We also note
that we have developed a highly reliable and valid scale to measure domain-specific lead user
status in a consumer context and marketing researchers may also find value in this scale.
Although work remains to be done, the idea of identifying and using emergent consumers
in the development of consumer products that mainstream consumers will find appealing seems
viable and worthy of the effort required to understanding it more fully.
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