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”

A grant proposal written by Prof. Dr. Daniel Wentzel (MAR) and Prof. Dr. Gerald Häubl (University of St. Gallen) to fund the project „Seeing the Forest or the Trees? The Impact of Global and Local Processing Styles on Consumer Responses to New Products” has been approved by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, short DFG. Over the next three years, research on the influence of global and local information processing styles on the use and evaluation of new products will be conducted.

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 difference in how the customer processes new product information may exert an influence on the success of those products. Three research questions are at the centre of this research project:

• Do different processing styles affect new product evaluation by facilitating or hindering the transfer of appropriate knowledge structures?
• How do consumers learn to use complex products and how do different processing styles affect the learning process
• In what ways can firms systematically trigger different processing styles in new product marketing?