1
Innovation Aesthetics: The Relationship between Category Cues, Categorization
Certainty and Newness Perceptions
We investigate the capacity of innovative visual aesthetics to inhibit a consumer’s
objective appreciation of a product’s newness. Findings from three studies indicate that if
consumers are not certain of a new product’s categorization, as can happen with innovative
aesthetics, a product’s newness will be surprisingly underappreciated.
2
Research suggests a disconnect between what marketers deem to be new and innovative
versus what consumers actually perceive (Gourville 2006). Many factors may contribute to
this, however, we investigate the factor that has significant potential to first attract a consumer
to a new product, the product’s visual aesthetic design. Despite the capacity for innovative
product design to elevate a company’s success in the marketplace, there has been little attempt
to determine how this may influence newness perceptions. It is acknowledged that “product
newness is a vital selling point,” (Bloch 1995) and “widely respected” (Moreau and Dahl
2005), and visual design is often a central focus of new product managers; yet when considered
together, there is limited insight into the factors that underlie their relationship. While research
on innovation adoption has identified factors that influence consumer preferences, the majority
of the studies assume product newness to be objectively perceived and appreciated by
participants. In contrast, we introduce a unique perspective of consumer response to new
products by examining newness perceptions as a dependent variable that is inherently
comparative, highly subjective and dependent on the certainty of underlying categorization
processes. By utilizing a categorization framework to examine the relationship between
innovative visual aesthetics and newness, we are also able to provide support for the role of
categorization certainty, a type of certainty that may account for the somewhat surprising
subjectivity of newness perceptions.
The relation between innovative visual aesthetics and newness perceptions has not been
well defined. There are at least two reasons for this. First, studies on new products have
typically made visual product information non-essential in the evaluation of an innovation by
not providing product pictures and focusing participants explicitly on written descriptions of a
product’s non-visual features, functionality, and benefits (e.g., Alexander et al. 2008; Castano
et al., 2008; Hoeffler 2003; Lajos et al. 2009). Second, research investigating consumer
response to design has used products that do not deviate visually in any substantial way from
typical category members (Cox and Cox 2002; Page and Herr 2002; Veryzer and Hutchinson
1998). In contrast, our focus is on innovative visual aesthetics. When the exterior of a product
differs significantly from known category members, identifying the product’s category may be
difficult, uncertain or impossible. With the innovative Roomba vacuum, for example, even if
consumers were provided with the product’s category, uncertainty in the vacuum label may
arise because its design is drastically different from that of a prototypical vacuum. It is this
uncertainty in a new product’s categorization that we predict will explain the influence of
innovative aesthetics on newness perceptions.
We define categorization certainty as the level of confidence an individual has in their
categorization of a product. This parallels a construct in attitude persuasion, thought
confidence (Petty, Brinol, and Tormala 2002). Similar to how thought confidence is proposed
to influence attitudes, we propose that how certain a consumer is in the categorization of a
product will influence newness perceptions. The source of categorization uncertainty may vary.
For instance, Gregan-Paxton et al. (2005) and Lajos et al. (2009) explored categorization
uncertainty associated with products that possess features and functionality from different
categories. We build on this, by explicitly defining and measuring categorization certainty and
its independent effect on newness perceptions in response to innovative aesthetics. Specifically,
we predict that when categorization certainty is low (high), an aesthetically innovative new
product will be rated as less (more) new (hypothesis 1).
When faced with innovative product design, consumers will first seek to identify the
new product’s category. Innovative aesthetics may make categorization difficult and reliance
on all available category cues will be necessary to identify a product’s category with certainty.
3
In our attempt to isolate the effect of innovative visual aesthetics on newness perceptions, we
treat product function and brand name as additional sources of category information or cues, as
these may be processed in addition to visual aesthetics to confirm a product’s categorization.
Thus, we anticipate that when additional diagnostic category cues are available, the more
certain consumers will be in a product’s categorization and the newer they will perceive an
innovative product. We predict that categorization certainty will mediate the influence of
category cues on newness perceptions (hypothesis 2).
In studies 1 and 2, we manipulated the availability of supplemental category cues,
during exposure to a new product, to examine how additional category information affects the
relation between categorization certainty and newness perceptions. In study 1, the number of
category cues available to participants was manipulated through the presence or absence of a
brand name on the product’s exterior. In study 2, category cue level was manipulated by having
participants either view a picture of a new product or a video demonstration. Support for both
hypotheses was found in studies 1 and 2. In study 3, we contrasted two products from the same
category, through a manipulation of design prototypicality, to further demonstrate that
innovative visual aesthetics exacerbates the negative effect of categorization uncertainty on
newness perceptions.
Prior investigations have not defined or isolated the effect of categorization certainty on
judgements, like newness perceptions, that occur early in the new product adoption process,
nor examined the role of visual aesthetics and availability of category cues as antecedents to
categorization uncertainty. We demonstrate that if a consumer cannot categorize a new product
with certainty, as can happen with innovative aesthetic design, a product’s newness is likely to
be underappreciated. Our findings do not imply that product designers should be conservative
in the visual design of their new products. In fact, Verganti (2006) points out that radical
innovations actually tend to have longer commercial success, higher margins and increased
consumer receptivity. Rather, our findings suggest that there is a potential danger in letting
consumers self select and validate a new product’s category membership. Consistent with
Verganti (2006), our research emphasizes the importance of “preparing the public” for
“ground-breaking products”. When introducing new products with innovative visual aesthetics,
this preparation should come through the careful and deliberate disclosure of a product’s
category membership.
REFERENCES
Alexander, D. L., Lynch Jr., J. G., and Wang, Q. (2008). As time goes by: Do cold feet follow
warm intentions for really new versus incrementally new products. Journal of Consumer
Research, 45 (June), 307-19.
Bloch, P. H. (1995). Seeking the ideal form: Product design and consumer response. Journal of
Marketing, 59 (July), 16-29.
Castano, R., Sujan, M., Kacker, M., and Sujan, H. (2008). Managing consumer uncertainty in
the adoption of new products: Temporal distance and mental simulation. Journal of
Marketing Research, 45 (3), 320-36.
4
Cox, D. and Cox, A.D. (2002). Beyond First Impressions: The effects of repeated exposure on
consumer liking of visually complex and simple product designs. Journal of the Academy of
Marketing Science, 30 (2), 119-30.
Gourville, J. T. (2006). Eager sellers stony buyers: understanding the psychology of new
product adoption. Harvard Business Review, 84 (6), 98-106.
Gregan-Paxton, J., Hoeffler, S., and Zhao, M. (2005). When categorization is ambiguous:
Factors that facilitate the use of a multiple category inference strategy. Journal of
Consumer Psychology, 15 (2), 127-40.
Hoeffler, S. (2003). Measuring preferences for really new products. Journal of Marketing
Research, 40 (4), 406-20.
Lajos, J., Katona, Z., Chattopadhyay, A., and Sarvary, M. (2009). Category activation model:
A spreading activation network model of subcategory positioning when uncertainty is high.
Journal of Consumer Research, 36 (June).
Moreau, C. Page and Darren W. Dahl (2005), "Designing the Solution: The Impact of
Constraints on Consumers’ Creativity," Journal of Consumer Research, 32 (June), 13-22.
Page, C. and Herr, P. M. (2002). An investigation of the processes by which product design
and brand strength interact to determine initial affect and quality judgments. Journal of
Consumer Psychology, 12 (2), 133-47.
Petty, Richard E., Pablo Brinol, and Zakary L. Tormala (2002), "Thought Confidence as a
Determinant of Persuasion: The Self-Validation Hypothesis," Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology, 82 (5), 722-41.
Verganti, R. (2006). Innovating through design. Harvard Business Review, 84 (12), 114-22.
Veryzer, R. W. JR. and Hutchinson, J. W. (1998). The influence of unity and prototypicality on
aesthetic responses to new product designs. Journal of Consumer Research, 24 (March),
374-94.