The Influence Of Goal-derived Categories On The Value Perception Of Convergent Products

With the socio-economical and technological development, convergence has become an inevitable trend in the field of consumer electronics products. The entire industry has shown a continuous "technological innovation" feature with convergence-oriented developing. Usually, consumers will expect a product to have as many features as possible to meet their various needs, and this becomes a broad foundation for the convergent products. Driven by such a demand, product convergence becomes a trend. The most direct feeling of convergent products by people is that they are easy and convenient to use, and more advanced than the separated products no matter in space occupation or portability. In addition to greatly enhance of the using efficiency, the convergent products are more able to reflect the personalized care for users.Although the convergent trend can not be reversed, but the road is not always smooth. Even in the same economic environment, the market performance of different kinds of products would show a large difference. This problem is partly because that some of the convergence technology are immature, and many convergent products are just a simple piling of the features. The expected effect wasn’t achieved but greatly reduced after convergence: Moreover, in the integration process some products are lack of marketing research for the user’s needs and habits, just made a forced technical and functional grafting, so that the convergent products were became the users’ burden. So we can say that, the successful integration of the products not only depends on the technology, but also on the understanding about user’s needs, that is to converge what kind of features together in order to achieve the maximization of consumer value.In the past research of convergent products, the researchers noticed that:for consumers, to select what kind of functions to integrate is the key of their feelings for the products value, which is more important than the selection of the amount of converged functions. But from the current view of research literature, the research on the functional category of converged products has just begun. We have noticed that, classifying the function of the products according to the target will help us understand the process of selecting and predilection better for converged or hybrid products from the consumer’s point of view. Because the integration of function is not simply a technical problem, or a simple overlay of technique, but have to serve for the consumer’s goals. Therefore, the main purpose of this study is to consider the influence on the perceived value under similarity in consumer’s target determines function judgment, which based on existing research literature of convergent products.The whole paper is divided into three parts:Introduction, Theoretical development and Empirical research. Among them, the Introduction section includes Chapter1, primarily to clarify the background, significance, main content, research methods and the framework. The second part is the theoretical development, including Chapter2to Chapter5, which analyzed the concept and the theoretical background of convergent products and proposed the viewpoints and theoretical foundation of this research, which is based on the review of relevant literature on the theoretical background and goal-derived categories of the product function. In this part, we developed the theoretical model, and proposed practical research hypothesis. The third part is the empirical research, with three laboratory experiments, we examined the theoretical framework and its importance for consumers and businesses proposed in the second part, and accordingly proposed the conclusion and its managerial significant, pointing out the limitations and the future research proposals. The chapters are summarized as follows:In Chapter1, the study focused primarily on the research background, methods and themes. Through the explanation of the developing trends of consumer electronics market and marketing performance of convergent products, we introduced the research background and the reason why to study the integration of products function. We also clarified the importance of this study for marketing theory and practice based on existing literature. This study then described the content, method and framework of this research.In Chapter2, we reviewed the existing literature about converged products. Firstly, we investigated the concept definition and perceived evaluation of different scholars in current studies. Then, we summarized the factor and influence of converged products function in the relevant literature, and pointed out the existing limitations in current research.In Chapter3, we expounded the main content of the category theory. We firstly reviewed the two different ways by which people usually classified the daily world:one is down-up way based on the similarity judgment and the other is top-down way based on objective judgment. And we examined the performance of the two ways of classification in daily life, we also proposed the category to achieve significant goals for construction, which can effectively remind the enterprise consumer where the consume goals and interests are, and this is an ideal way to classify the functions of the converged products. Then we discussed the concepts, theoretical background and differences between the two ways of classification, which is also known as goal-derived categories and common taxonomic categories.In Chapter4, we reviewed the goal system theory, since we believe that by the way of goal-derived categories we can have a better understanding of the process of selecting and predilection for converged or fuzzy category products from the consumer’s point of view. Convergent products is that converged by different categories of functions representing different target, so we also need to understand how people perceive and handle a variety of goals existing at the same time.In Chapter5, we have developed a theoretical framework and specific research hypotheses of this study. Firstly, we summarized the conceptual model of this study based on the literature summary; Secondly, we proposed the hypothesis based on literature review and conceptual model.In Chapter6, we examined the difference of the consumer’s perceived value whether the functions of basic products are typical products or atypical products and whether the added goal is congruent or incongruent. By manipulating the different basic products, we proved that when the basic product is typical products, the converged function will be diluted; but the atypical product is not influenced like this.In Chapter7, we used different product types to validate a series of assumptions again to further confirm the conclusions of the previous experiment. And the conclusion proved that our hypothesis can be applied for different types of products.In Chapter8, the previous experiment has considered the influence of the valuation for convergent products caused by the position of the products in goal-derived categories and whether the target of the additional functions and the basic products are the same. Therefore, in the following experiment we also need to consider when the consumer’s consumption goals is different type, whether the evaluation of the converged products function will change. In Chapter9, we summarized the theories and demonstrations of the whole paper, drew the conclusions and made an overall discussion of these conclusions. In this chapter, we also indicated out the theoretical contribution and management enlightenment and discussed the limitations of the study.In a word, this paper made an exploration on the problem of convergent products functions from the perspective of goal-derived categories, integrated the current study on convergent products and category theories, using normative research and empirical method. The discoveries enriched the current research literature on convergent products, which are of great importance to the enterprises to understand the consumers’ perceiving process of convergent products better, and provide the insightful suggestions for the marketing practices of the enterprises.