The Impact of Product Aesthetics in Consumer Choice: A Dual Process Explanation

There is a general understanding that way a product looks influences its success in the marketplace. And yet there is a dearth of academic research in the field of marketing on this issue. The current research offers both examples of how product aesthetics affects choice behavior differently from more functional attributes and insights into why this occurs. This research, therefore, underlines the importance of studying aesthetics by revealing that it cannot be assumed to influence choice in the same manner as other attributes.;This dissertation includes a two-part model of product evaluation where processes influencing choice behavior are separated along the dimension of automaticity versus deliberateness. In contrast to previous models of product evaluation, this model emphasizes the automatic processes and, in doing so, reveals this to be an important cause of the differential influence of aesthetics on consumer choice. In five lab experiments I then examine specific aspects of this model. Specifically, Studies 1 and 2 reveal ways in which aesthetics' influence on choice differs from that of more functional attributes; aesthetics has a much flatter price response and respondents do not seem entirely aware of its importance in choice. Study 3 then tests the notion that aesthetics is processed automatically while other attributes are processed only deliberately. Study 3 illustrates how when deliberate thinking is curtailed, the influence of aesthetics increases in choice. Studies 4 and 5 reveal how choice of a highly aesthetic option can be a form of self-affirmation. And a desire for this self-affirmation is another manner in which aesthetics automatically influences product preference. Taken together these five studies support the two-part model of product evaluation and, moreover, the claim that aesthetics' differential impact on choice is due to the more automatic manner in which it is processed relative to other attributes.