Effects Of Organizing Products With Complements Versus Substitutes On Attractiveness And Visual Search Of Anthropomorphic Products

In recent years,anthropomorphic products have received more and more attention from researchers,but most of the existing studies have focused on the manipulation of anthropomorphic products,their marketing effects,or their impact on consumer behavior.These studies have greatly ignored product consumption.An important background information about the consumer environment.The organization of products is an important manifestation of the consumption environment.Many studies have shown that substitute-based/complement-based organizations may have different effects on the consumption of non-anthropomorphic/anthropomorphic products by inducing different shopping orientations or getting close to different consumers.Therefore,this research intends to start with substitute-based/complement-based organizations,examine the influence of the background organizations on the evaluation of the attractiveness of anthropomorphic(and non-anthropomorphic)products,and to investigate the potential attentional bias of background organizations by using the visual search paradigm.In addition,this research will also choose physical products and virtual products as different experimental materials to try to explore the generalization of the influence of background organizations in different product categories.This article includes three studies: In the first study,anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic physical products were selected as experimental materials to investigate whether substitute-based/complement-based organizations had different effects on the evaluation of the attractiveness of anthropomorphic products compared with non-anthropomorphic products.In study 2,anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic physical products were also selected as experimental materials,and visual search paradigm was adopted to investigate whether the impact of substitute-based/complement-based organizations on the search efficiency of anthropomorphic products compared with non-anthropomorphic products,so as to explore the attention mechanism.Study 1 and study 2 used entity class products as experimental materials,study 3 selected three anthropomorphic and anthropomorphic mobile phone applications as the experimental materials of virtual products,the online questionnaires was used to investigate whether the influence of substitute-based/complement-based organizations of the anthropomorphic products on the evaluation of attractiveness of anthropomorphic products can be promoted from physical products to virtual products.The results of the study found:(1)Substitute-based/complement-based organizations will affect the evaluation of attractiveness and the evaluation of anthropomorphism of physical anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic products.This effect is manifested in the organizations of the background(substitute-based,complement-based)and the type of clarity of the background products(clear,fuzzy)and background products will have an interactive impact on the evaluation of anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic products.Specifically,complement-based organizations(compared to substitute-based organizations)can more effectively improve the attractiveness of products;different organizations can promote the evaluation of attractiveness and anthropomorphic of anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic products.Different organizations may either promote(background effect)or hinder(reverse background effect)the evaluation of attractiveness and the evaluation of anthropomorphic of anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic products.The effect of background organizations appears more in the clear background condition.(2)Substitute-based/complement-based organizations will affect the attention search performance of physical anthropomorphic and non-anthropomorphic products.The specific performance is: under substitute-based organizations condition,product search will be more difficult;no matter what the background organizations is,anthropomorphic target products will capture the attention of consumers and cause attention fixation.(3)The impact of substitute-based/complement-based organizations on physical products can be extended to virtual products.Specifically,the impact of substitute-based/complement-based organizations on attractiveness evaluation,anthropomorphic evaluation and installation possibility evaluation of APP icons in APP stores is basically the same as the impact of physical products.Based on the research results of this paper,we suggest that more anthropomorphic designs can be introduced into product design.However,in order to obtain better evaluations and increase consumers’ willingness to buy,it is not enough to rely solely on the design of anthropomorphic products.Need to pay attention to the background factors that accompany the product sales.These background factors include both the organizations of the background product and the type of the background product.