Abstract
Despite the proliferation of multifunctional products, survey data suggests that instead of relying on one multifunctional product, consumers now rely on a community of multifunctional products, using them interchangeably to perform similar tasks. Such consumption patterns stand in stark contrast to consumers’ well-documented aversion towards waste. Why are consumers willing to dispose of multifunctional products that still have some working capabilities and/or to pay for functional redundancies? We suggest that controlling for the absolute level of performance (e.g., the megapixels of the camera), consumers perceive the same functionality to be less valuable when it is performed by a multifunctional product (e.g., the camera on a smartphone) than by a single, dedicated product (an inexpensive digital camera). We investigate this phenomenon across a series of four experiments which are aimed at documenting the basic effect and elucidating the underlying psychology.
Original language | American English |
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Pages (from-to) | 17-25 |
Number of pages | 9 |
Journal | Journal of Sustainable Marketing |
Volume | 3 |
Issue number | 1 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - 1 Jan 2022 |
Keywords
- Circular supply chains
- consumer behavior
- lab experiments
- multifunctional products
- sustainable consumer behavior
- sustainable consumer psychology
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Marketing