ASSOCIATION FOR CONSUMER RESEARCH
Labovitz School of Business & Economics, University of Minnesota Duluth, 11 E. Superior Street, Suite 210, Duluth, MN 55802
Consumer Responses to Discontinuance of Favorite Products: an Exploratory Study
Melissa A. Martin, George Mason University
EXTENDED ABSTRACT - How many varieties of laundry detergent do we really need? This question and others like it have
become the center of recent debate among manufacturers, retailers, and marketing scholars. Trends in the marketing environment
have led to product proliferation, followed by pruning of brands, creating a highly unstable Aproduct churning@ situation.
Consumers are presented with a confusing, crowded, and constantly shifting landscape of products from which to make selections.
[to cite]:
Melissa A. Martin (2004) ,"Consumer Responses to Discontinuance of Favorite Products: an Exploratory Study", in NA Advances in Consumer Research Volume 31, eds. Barbara E. Kahn and Mary Frances Luce, Valdosta, GA : Association for
Consumer Research, Pages: 662-663.
[url]:
http://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/8986/volumes/v31/NA-31
[copyright notice]:
This work is copyrighted by The Association for Consumer Research. For permission to copy or use this work in whole or in
part, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center at http://www.copyright.com/.
Consumer Responses to Discontinuance of Favorite Products: An Exploratory Study
Melissa A. Martin, George Mason University
EXTENDED ABSTRACT
How many varieties of laundry detergent do we really need?
This question and others like it have become the center of recent
debate among manufacturers, retailers, and marketing scholars.
Trends in the marketing environment have led to product proliferation, followed by pruning of brands, creating a highly unstable
“product churning” situation. Consumers are presented with a
confusing, crowded, and constantly shifting landscape of products
from which to make selections.
This unstable marketing environment makes it increasingly
likely that consumers will encounter the discontinuance of preferred product alternatives. Although brand and line extensions
have been studied extensively by researchers, the withdrawal of
products from the market has received little attention, despite its
growing frequency. Existing research on the topic has focused
primarily on the impact of attributes of phantom alternatives
(Farquhar & Pratkanis, 1993) and on the role of psychological
reactance (Brehm & Brehm, 1981). The impact of affect, and of the
customer’s prior relationship with the brand, has received little
attention, despite the fact that consumers’ descriptions of product
discontinuance events are often extremely emotion-laden.
This research increases our understanding of consumer responses to product discontinuance events, with particular attention
given to emotional and behavioral responses and judgments of
responsibility. As a first step in this process, consumers’ stories of
product discontinuance experiences were collected using the Critical Incident Technique (Flanagan, 1954). 145 subjects responded to
a series of open-ended questions about a memorable discontinuance experience. Their recollections were analyzed for common
trends and themes. The products mentioned by subjects encompassed a wide variety of product categories, with notable differences in the categories mentioned most frequently by males (fast
food and non-alcoholic beverages) and females (toiletries, perfume, and cosmetics).
Product unavailability situations reported included geographic
unavailability (in which the subject moved to another region or
country and could no longer obtain the product), cyclic unavailability (in which the product is regularly withdrawn and re-introduced,
as with the McDonald’s McRib sandwich), elimination of an entire
brand, elimination of an entire category (for example, eight track
tapes), and product line contraction, in which the discontinued
product alternative belongs to a branded product line. This last
category was the most often reported, representing 68% of the
incidents. In product line contraction situations, consumers’ reactions to the withdrawal of the discontinued alternative may influence future evaluation of, and loyalty towards, the brand, making
these incidents particularly relevant for further study.
Subjects reported a wide variety of emotional responses to the
discontinuance incident, with anger and sadness being the most
common affective responses mentioned. The tendency to respond
with anger appeared to increase with duration of product use before
its discontinuance. Different types of losses incurred were also
mentioned. The most often-mentioned losses were of ease of choice
(due to the need to incur additional search costs in the category) and
utility (if the discontinued alternative had unique features unavailable in any other available product). Mentions were also made of
loss of self-concept (typically associated with perfumes and scented
products), diminished ability to perform (typically associated with
sports equipment), and losses of connections to others or to the past.
Subjects were also asked why they believed the product had
been withdrawn. A variety of reasons were offered, low sales
volume being the most frequently mentioned explanation. Several
other explanations were proposed, including replacement of the
product by a new version which did not possess the attributes valued
in the original, failure on management’s part to promote the product
correctly, lack of retailer support, and shifting consumer tastes. The
data offered some preliminary evidence to suggest that explanations attributing either willful behavior (“change for its own sake”)
or incompetence (failure to promote the product) to the manufacturer were more likely to be associated with angry emotional
responses. This finding, if supported by future research, would be
consistent with Weiner’s (1995) work on judgments of responsibility, blame, and the incidence of anger.
Subjects were asked to report purchase behavior before the
preferred alternative became available (if they were able to remember such a time), and also their purchase choices after the preferred
alternative was discontinued. The patterns of subjects who reported
product line contraction events were analyzed, and the following
patterns emerged:
(1) After discontinuance of a preferred product alternative,
subjects in this study selected an alternative from a different brand more often than they selected another alternative
within the same brand (43% to 34%, with the remainder
exiting the category or switching between brands with no
reported preference).
(2) Subjects who had switched to the discontinued product
from another product in the same brand (i.e., from one type
of Pantene shampoo to another that became their favorite)
were more likely to select an alternative within the brand
after discontinuance than to switch. Even among these
subjects, though, 42% either switched to another brand or
cycled between brands frequently with no reported preference.
It is difficult from these data to identify the reason for the brand
switching behavior observed. The search for preferred product
attributes may offer a satisfactory explanation; however, it is also
possible that discontinuance experiences may damage the consumer-brand relationship (Fournier, 1998), making a previously
loyal consumer more prone to defect to another brand.
While statistical inferences should not be drawn from these
data, which among other things may suffer from retrospective bias,
the patterns identified in these incident reports suggest that discontinued product alternatives have affective consequences for consumers which may lead to behavioral consequences relevant to
marketers. Further research should study these patterns in more
detail. In particular, it would be helpful to marketers to understand
the impact of marketing communications when discontinuing a
product on consumers’ judgments of motives and intent, and on
subsequent brand loyalty. While this research by no means intends
to suggest that product should never be discontinued, it may be
possible to identify strategies to minimize negative consequences
for manufacturers and their brands, while still pruning unprofitable
offerings from their product lines.
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