Most digital marketers rely heavily on customer reviews or teasers. However, when we collaborated with Samsung Electronics to run two field experiments, we uncovered a critical mismatch between messaging and audience.
We specifically targeted busy, dual-earner parents. Our surprising finding is that benefit-driven formats like customer reviews or teaser pages were largely ignored. Instead, clear, feature-focused messaging outperformed the popular formats.
This field experiment demonstrates why a one-size-fits-all strategy fails in the complex smart home category, providing a necessary blueprint for engaging high-intent consumers with efficient, direct communication.
Purpose: The objective of this study is to explore the effect of family and message type interactions on the sales of smart home products. The study hypothesizes that dual-earner parents, a prolific segment of consumers, will indicate a greater willingness to pay for smart home products when exposed to characteristics-related marketing messages.
Design/methodology/approach: Two quasi-experimental studies were conducted to test the hypothesis. In collaboration with Samsung Electronics, the studies utilized different smart home product bundles (Smart Air Care and Smart Safety Care), recruited distinct participant groups (parents of children aged three to five and parents of children aged zero to three), and manipulated different types of benefits-related messages (a user review video and a teaser page).
Findings: In response to smart home product messaging, dual-earner parents exhibited greater willingness to pay when exposed to characteristics-related messages compared to benefits-related messages. This difference was not found among single-earner parents.
Originality: Challenging conventional marketing assumptions, the findings demonstrate that benefits-related messages do not universally appeal to smart home product consumers, while characteristics-related messages can increase willingness to pay among dual-earner segment. The collaboration with Samsung Electronics in a quasi-experimental setting strengthens the external validity of the results, suggesting that marketers should tailor messaging strategies based on the characteristics of customer segments.
Keywords: Smart home products, dual-earner parents, message type, Samsung Electronics
“… dual-earner parents’ willingness to pay nearly doubled when presented with characteristics-related messages compared to benefits-related messages, increasing by 163% in Study 1 and 162% in Study 2. This suggests that tailoring messages to this group could significantly boost market penetration and profitability in the competitive smart home product sector.”
When I first arrived at the narrow entrance of Onikai near downtown Kyoto, I did not expect much. Inside this small restaurant, however, I found a huge counter filled with young, energetic staff who were joking and moving quickly. Since this place felt alive, it reminded me of Dutch Bros in California.
I ordered several dishes: an arugula salad, an eggplant topped with beef sauce, a mushroom rice cooked in a clay pot, and an eggplant slowly burnt and served with sesame. They were light and comfortable. Even when beef was used, they supported vegetables, not dominate them.
This vegetable-first idea feels right for today’s diners. People care about where their food comes from, but they do not all want to be vegan. Balancing freshness, taste, and casual atmosphere reminded me of how In-N-Out in California became trusted and popular by keeping food local and simple.
Dining at Onikai made me think more about what to eat in daily life. In many Western countries, people often focus on which vitamins or supplements to take every day. But Onikai’s vegetable-centered dishes remind me that health can come from everyday meals, not from bottles or pills.
I believe vegetable-centric meal will gradually be adopted by more diners around the world, not as a trend, but as a sustainable way of living.
This article addresses a simple theoretical question of high substantive relevance: What makes a consumption experience special in a consumer’s mind? To answer this question, the authors report an extensive multi-method investigation involving a grounded theory analysis of numerous consumer narratives and in-depth interviews, a field survey, a scale development study, a natural language processing analysis of more than 3 million Yelp reviews, a preregistered multi-factor causal experiment (and its preregistered replication), a blind comparison of hundreds of matched visual Instagram posts by third-party observers, and several small application studies. The findings converge in identifying three major psychological pillars of what makes consumption experiences feel special to consumers, each pillar involving different facets: (a) uniqueness, which arises from the rarity, novelty, irreproducibility, personalization, exclusivity, ephemerality, and surpassing of expectations of the experience; (b) meaningfulness, which pertains to the personal significance of the experience in terms of symbolism, relationships, self-affirmation, and self-transformation; and (c) authenticity, which relates to the perceived genuineness and realness of the experience in terms of its psychological proximity to some original source, iconicity, human sincerity, and connection to nature. As illustrated in the General Discussion, the findings have important substantive implications for the engineering of hedonic consumption experiences.
I visited Go Greek Yogurt in Beverly Hills one morning. This place started in 2012, founded by people who wanted to bring authentic Greek yogurt and Mediterranean lifestyle to California.
Inside the store, I noticed a wall sign that explains six reasons why this yogurt is good: low sugar, low carb, low calorie, simple ingredients, high probiotics, and guilt-free indulgence. These messages match well with what young consumers want today.
The store offers nine different yogurts: Plain Tart, Chocolate Classic, Greek Honey, Rose Petals, Hazelnut, Mango, Blackberry, Strawberry, and Vegan Strawberry. I like this variety because I am still searching for the yogurt that fits me. What I love more is that nine different yogurts are stored in big transparent glass containers. This gives the impression that yogurts are home-made.
Variety also appears in the toppings. Some are natural fruits like strawberries and pineapples, while others are processed sweets like chocolates and Skittles. The staff was preparing fresh fruits by peeling and cutting them for the next serving.
The menu suggests combinations such as “House Classics,” mixing Greek Honey, Hazelnut, Rose, and Strawberry.
The portion is generous, enough to share or to replace a meal. Go Greek Yogurt is a nice mix of freshness and taste. It shows how yogurt can be both indulgent and healthy.
Transparent packages are pervasive in food consumption environments. Yet prior research has not systematically examined whether and how transparent packaging affects food consumption. The authors propose that transparent packaging has two opposing effects on food consumption: it enhances food salience, which increases consumption (salience effect), and it facilitates consumption monitoring, which decreases consumption (monitoring effect). They argue that the net effect of transparent packaging on food consumption is moderated by food characteristics (e.g., unit size, appearance). For small, visually attractive foods, the monitoring effect is low, so the salience effect dominates, and people eat more from a transparent package than from an opaque package. For large foods, the monitoring effect dominates the salience effect, decreasing consumption. For vegetables, which are primarily consumed for their health benefits, consumption monitoring is not activated, so the salience effect dominates, which ironically decreases consumption. The authors’ findings suggest that marketers should offer small foods in transparent packages and large foods and vegetables in opaque packages to increase postpurchase consumption (and sales).
When I stayed at the Simpson House Inn in Santa Barbara, the staff told me to visit the Santa Barbara Company for gifts. They said it is the best place. I went there and saw why.
The store does not only sell items one by one. It makes gift boxes with many different things.
One basket had bath salts, white sage soap, a candle, and a seaside mist. These items are chosen for a calming ritual.
Another box had honey, tea bags, postcards, and a candle, showing the taste of Santa Ynez Valley.
A third box had cookies, a honey lollipop, dried flowers, and a small owl-shaped soap. Each box gave a different feeling.
Making these combinations is not simple. It is difficult to choose across categories and still make the gift feel right. But when it works, it matches well with the personal taste of the receiver. One good example is the wine display by the Inglenook winery.
I do not believe AI could easily perform this task. AI can recommend based on past data, but true curation requires subjectivity. To make new and surprising combinations, human taste and imagination are needed. In that sense, curated gift boxes remind me that human taste is still a unique form of intelligence
Contemporary electronic manufacturers struggle with how to develop attractive bundles by combining their existing smart products. In the present work, we propose Goal Based Bundling (GBB) by drawing on the academic research of goal systems theory (Kruglanski et al., 2018) and shed light on two previously ignored aspects of bundling strategy: service and glue product. We applied our GBB to a collaborative project with Samsung Electronics, whose goal was to develop new product bundles for kids by combining multiple smart home products. We constructed a framework of Samsung Electronics’ smart products and then visualized it on its sales website. A UI design conveying the value of smart products bundle was developed based on GBB structure. We discuss the process and the result of our project to provide insights into the product managers who combine existing smart products to develop a bundle.
I visited Au Bon Climat in Santa Barbara for a wine tasting. They served four wines under the same winery. Each wine had a different story: one was named after the winemaker’s mother, another after his daughter, and another after his son. The tasting experience combined with these stories felt personal.
What surprised me more was the wine label. Most wine bottles use square or rectangle labels, but Au Bon Climat uses a triangle label. This shape made the bottle stand out from many other wines on the shelf. Such a small design detail could change how people notice and remember a brand.
This paper investigates whether including authentic information on the back labels of wine bottles enhances consumers’ confidence and purchase intentions about wine; it also assesses the moderating role of involvement and knowledge about wine. We conducted two experimental studies. Study 1 generated three findings. First, when the back label had authentic information, subjects showed higher confidence levels. Second, this effect was hold for subjects with low levels of involvement. Finally, we did not observe this effect for subjects with high levels of involvement. Study 2 extended study 1’s findings and identified the moderated mediation effect of confidence. The findings highlight the important impact on wine choice of authentic information. However, the findings also suggest that authentic information may not be sufficient to attract people with high levels of involvement and knowledge. This study’s findings provide wine producers with practical marketing insights.
I visited one Erewhon store in Los Angeles. Erewhon is known as the most expensive grocery store in the world. All items are organic or health-focused, and many are linked to celebrities or wellness influencers.
The smoothies are expensive and some are named after Hailey Bieber or Travis Scott. Even a small sushi wild tuna roll costs $14.
But what surprised me more was how carefully the vegetables were displayed. Each carrot and leaf was perfectly lined up. It looked almost like a vegetable museum. This kind of display, along with sustainable ingredients and celebrity hype, might help customers feel the price is worth it.
Understanding consumer decision making about what to eat is both complex, as multiple factors can drive food choice, and important, as food choice impacts overall health. This research examines an intuition at the crossroads of two important criteria for food decision making—healthiness and price—finding that consumers believe that healthier food is more expensive than less healthy food. While this relationship may be accurate in some cases, consumers overgeneralize this belief to contexts and product categories where it is not objectively true. As a result, the healthy = expensive intuition influences consumer decision making by impacting inferences of missing attributes and choice between alternatives. Further, consistent with dual process models, the intuition acts as a bias in shaping how consumers process information about health and price when consumers are processing heuristically, including altering both perceptions of how “healthy” a given ingredient is as a function of product price and the amount of information search consumers engage in when evaluating health claims, such that consumers have a higher standard of evidence when evaluating intuition-inconsistent claims. Overall, the healthy = expensive intuition has a powerful influence on consumer decision making, with significant implications for both consumers and marketers.
At the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, I stopped by a souvenir shop featuring local designers. One product package caught my eye: a candle sealed inside a sardine can. It was one of the most unexpected and playful mismatches between form and function I have seen.
Designs like this stand out. But are they effective? Research suggests that consumer responses to such mismatches depend on the type of product. For functional products, incongruent designs can enhance preference. For experiential products, however, congruent designs are better. In other words, mismatch works best when the product is seen as utilitarian.
Yet this sardine-can candle, clearly a hedonic product, seems to challenge the logic. Despite its experiential nature, the mismatch in form adds charm.
The real question is whether the surprise created by the product package fade after the first glance or continues through the purchase experience. This souvenir suggests it endures. I bought two candles partly to appreciate the creativity the designers put into it. The unexpected packaging not only captures attention but also transforms the ordinary into something curiously extraordinary.
Marketers struggle with how best to position innovative products that are incongruent with consumer expectations. Compounding the issue, many incongruent products are the result of innovative changes in product form intended to increase hedonic appeal. Crossing various product categories with various positioning tactics in a single meta-analytic framework, the authors find that positioning plays an important role in how consumers evaluate incongruent form. The results demonstrate that when a product is positioned on functional dimensions, consumers show more preferential evaluations for moderately incongruent form than for congruent form. However, when a product is positioned on experiential dimensions, consumers show more preferential evaluations for congruent form than for moderately incongruent form. Importantly, an increase in perceived hedonic benefits mediates the former, whereas a decrease in perceived utilitarian benefits mediates the latter. The mediation effects are consistent with the view that consumers must first understand a product’s functionality before engaging in hedonic consumption.
On a sunny Saturday, I watched a classic movie titled To Be or Not to Be at the Stanford Theatre, a historic theater in Palo Alto. This movie experience felt like quiet therapy. I want to keep returning to this theatre for several reasons.
First, the analog ticketing gave me human connection. I received a red paper ticket at the tall glass booth, and another person inside cut it in half and handed it back. This mechanical process made me feel warmly connected.
Second, it was affordable in an expensive area. The ticket was $7, which is cheaper than a typical restaurant tip, and a small popcorn was only $1.50. In a place like Palo Alto where everything feels expensive, this low price made me feel comfortable.
Third, and most important, was the atmosphere. Most of the audience were senior couples, quietly watching the movie. Nobody used smartphones and nobody spoke loudly. I did not interact with them, but I felt comfort simply being near them. This calm environment helped me slow down my thoughts that dynamic AI talks never could. Although we often study seniors, we know little about how we feel when quietly sharing space with seniors. Perhaps, we enjoy being near them, watching them chat softly and walk slowly.
Independent theaters like the Stanford Theatre may represent the future of cinema. Multiplexes continue to be positioned as destinations for young couples, but moviegoers are turning away from them. Instead of focusing on couples looking for extraordinary experience, theaters should become places for individuals seeking quiet and reflection.
Previous research has shown that trait concepts and stereotypes become active automatically in the presence of relevant behavior or stereotyped-group features. Through the use of the same priming procedures as in previous impression formation research, Experiment 1 showed that participants whose concept of rudeness was primed interrupted the experimenter more quickly and frequently than did participants primed with polite-related stimuli. In Experiment 2, participants for whom an elderly stereotype was primed walked more slowly down the hallway when leaving the experiment than did control participants, consistent with the content of that stereotype. In Experiment 3, participants for whom the African American stereotype was primed subliminally reacted with more hostility to a vexatious request of the experimenter. Implications of this automatic behavior priming effect for self-fulfilling prophecies are discussed, as is whether social behavior is necessarily mediated by conscious choice processes.
“…We constructed two versions of the scrambled sentence task: one elderly prime version, which contained words related to the elderly stereotype, and another, neutral version. For the elderly prime version, the critical stimuli were worried, Florida, old, lonely, grey, selfishly, careful, sentimental, wise, stubborn, courteous, bingo, withdraw, forgetful, retired, wrinkle, rigid, traditional, bitter, obedient, conservative, knits, dependent, ancient, helpless, gullible, cautious, and alone… In the neutral version, the elderly prime words were replaced with the words unrelated to the elderly stereotype (e.g., thirsty, clean, private).”
“…Participants in the elderly priming condition (M = 8.28 s) had a slower walking speed compared to participants in the neutral priming condition (M= 7.30 s), t(2S) = 2.86,p< .01, as predicted…”
“…Thus, our results are in harmony with those of Carver et al. (1983), who advanced a “behavioral schema” model as an explanation for modeling effects. According to the behavioral schema model, the perceptual and actional representations of the same type of behavior share many features in common and thus develop strong connections. As a result, if one has just perceived another person acting in a generous or an aggressive way, for example, one’s behavioral schema for generosity or aggression is activated and accessible, and so one is more likely to behave that way oneself in subsequent situations for which generosity or aggression is a relevant response.“
During this opportunity, I shared my research on green consumption conducted with Bohee Jung (Jung & Joo, 2021). We borrowed the concept of choice–preference inconsistency from consumer behavior research to test whether consumers over-choose green options even when they do not evaluate them highly.
We found that while 76% chose the green option, only 49% actually rated it more favorably. A similar gap can be seen in real-world cases like the hype around Starbucks plastic reusable cups. Although companies are often accused of greenwashing, consumers themselves contribute by over-choosing green products they do not fully use.
In the past, researchers focusing on environmentally friendly consumption have devoted attention to the intention–action gap, suggesting that consumers have positive attitudes toward an environmentally friendly product even though they are not willing to buy it. In the present study, we borrow insights from the behavioral decision making literature on preference reversal to introduce an opposite phenomenon—that is, consumers buying an environmentally friendly product even though they do not evaluate it highly. We further rely on the research on goals to hypothesize that choice–evaluation discrepancies disappear when consumers pursue an environmentally friendly goal. A two (Mode: Choice vs. Evaluation) by three (Goal: Control vs. Quality vs. Environmentally friendly) between-subjects experimental design was used to test the proposed hypotheses. Our findings obtained from 165 undergraduate students in Korea showed that, first, 76% of the participants chose an environmentally friendly cosmetic product whereas only 49% of the participants ranked it higher than a competing product, and, second, when participants read the sentence “You are now buying one of the two compact foundations in order to minimize the waste of buying new foundations,” the discrepancy disappeared (64% vs. 55%). Our experimental findings advance academic discussions of green consumption and the choice–evaluation discrepancy and have practical implications for eco-friendly marketing.
Inglenook winery, owned by filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, is famous for its fine wines and cinematic heritage. Its castle-like architecture is also impressive. However, beyond these attractions, Inglenook’s wine displays are unique.
Rather than presenting bottles in isolation, Inglenook pairs them with lifestyle products such as artisan candles, gourmet pasta, sketchbooks, and sun hats.
These combinations are not decorative. They suggest how wine is consumed and experienced in real life: during intimate dinners, relaxing moments, creative reflection, or outdoor leisure. The display turns wine into a lifestyle choice.
Likewise, Tsutaya bookstore pairs books with music, stationery, and home goods, helping visitors envision these products as part of their lifestyle.
At both the Napa winery and the Tokyo bookstore, lifestyle-oriented displays enable consumers to see how the products integrate into their daily lives, thereby increasing their perceived value.
Bundling is pervasive in today’s markets. However, the bundling literature contains inconsistencies in the use of terms and ambiguity about basic principles underlying the phenomenon. The literature also lacks an encompassing classification of the various strategies, clear rules to evaluate the legality of each strategy, and a unifying framework to indicate when each is optimal. Based on a review of the marketing, economics, and law literature, this article develops a new synthesis of the field of bundling, which provides three important benefits. First, the article clearly and consistently defines bundling terms and identifies two key dimensions that enable a comprehensive classification of bundling strategies. Second, it formulates clear rules for evaluating the legality of each of these strategies. Third, it proposes a framework of 12 propositions that suggest which bundling strategy is optimal in various contexts. The synthesis provides managers with a framework with which to understand and choose bundling strategies. It also provides researchers with promising avenues for further research.
