Project

Seeing the Forest or the Trees? The Impact of Global and Local Processing Styles on Consumer Responses to New Products

"Grants to fund the project „Seeing the Forest or the Trees? The Impact of Global and Local Processing Styles on Consumer Responses to New Products” To gain a competitive advantage, companies spend billions of dollars on developing new products and launching them on the market. Despite these enormous investments, failure rates for new products are substantial. Against this background, a broad body of research has examined how consumers evaluate and adopt new products and how companies can increase the effectiveness of new product development. One limitation of this literature, however, is that is has not examined how consumer acceptance of new products is influenced by their “psychological lens”, that is, by the manner in which they mentally process information relating to new products. In principle, consumers may process new products in a global or a local manner. In a global processing style consumers start focussing on the overall configuration of a product and then work downward toward its details whereas in a local processing style they begin with the details of a product and then work upward to its global configuration. The goal of this research project is to investigate the influence of these two processing styles on the use and evaluation of new products. In particular, the research project will address three interrelated questions: 1.Do different processing styles affect new product evaluation by facilitating or hindering the transfer of appropriate knowledge structures? 2.How do consumers learn to use complex products and how do different processing styles affect the learning process? 3.In what ways can firms systematically trigger different processing styles in new product marketing? Given the breadth of the research program, the effects of processing styles on consumer responses to new products will be tested through a range of different experimental methods. These studies may not only yield important theoretical insights, but may also show how firms can increase the effectiveness of new product launches by guiding consumers’ processing styles."