The resource reframes inclusive design not as a niche or compliance-driven activity, but as a strategic marketing orientation that improves consumer well-being, expands markets, and enhances firm outcomes. The deck is deliberately structured to move instructors and students from why inclusive design matters, to how inclusive design works, to what it looks like in practice across industries.

This resource functions as (1) a starter kit for instructors new to inclusive design, (2) a modular teaching tool for experienced faculty, and (3) a bridge between research, practice, and pedagogy.

Brief Descriptions of the Contents of the Resource

I. Why Teach Inclusive Design in Marketing and Business?

The opening section establishes the pedagogical motivation for inclusive design. It critiques the traditional marketing focus on the “average” or “mainstream” consumer and demonstrates how this default approach systematically excludes marginalized and underrepresented groups

II. Core Principles of Inclusive Design

The next section introduces a clear, three-principle definition of inclusive design, making the concept accessible and teachable:

1. Design with the extreme user in mind
   Students learn that inclusive design begins by recognizing exclusion and starting from the margins rather than the mean.
2. Focus on facilitating a match
   Emphasis is placed on the fit between users, products, environments, and usage contexts—not just product features.
3. Benefit a more diverse consumer base
   The “curb-cut effect” illustrates how designing for those at the margins often improves experiences for everyone.

III. Marketplace Mismatches and Consumer Experience

A central conceptual contribution of the deck is the marketplace mismatch framework, which explains how exclusion arises when consumer abilities and marketplace design are misaligned.

Students are introduced to four types of mismatches:

• Sensory (seeing, hearing, touching)
• Cognitive (processing and understanding information)
• Behavioral (performing required actions)
• Social (feeling respected, seen, and included)

IV. Frameworks for Teaching and Application

Several teaching-friendly frameworks are introduced to help students diagnose and design for inclusion.

• ADDRESSING framework: Encourages students to ask, “Who are we unintentionally excluding?” across dimensions such as age, disability, religion, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender, and national origin.
• DARE framework: Guides students through how consumers appraise inclusive (or exclusionary) design cues and how those appraisals shape emotions and behavior.
• Levels of inclusive design: Distinguishes between providing access, enabling engaged participation, and empowering success.
• MISMATCH framework: See above.

V. Pedagogical Guidance and Classroom Use

The deck provides instructors with teaching suggestions, including:

• How to sequence concepts across a class session or module
• Buzz-group discussions on barriers to inclusive design
• Experiential redesign exercises (e.g., redesigning everyday products for different user groups)
• Role-taking and perspective-taking exercises
• Integration of short videos and TED talks

VI. The 25 Mini Case Studies: Learning Through Practice

The heart of the flipping book is 25 concise mini case studies, designed to be discussed individually or comparatively. Each case highlights:

• A specific form of exclusion
• The resulting consumer–marketplace mismatch
• A concrete inclusive design solution
• Broader implications for firms and society

Case categories include:

• Consumer products (durables; e.g., footwear, appliances, furniture, backpacks)
• Inclusive services (e.g., financial services, hospitality, retail, theme parks)
• Consumer products (nondurables; e.g., beauty, personal care, grooming)
• Technology (e.g., gaming, navigation tools)
• Inclusive tourism (5 bonus cases; e.g., airlines, adventure parks, public spaces, social enterprises)

VII. Inclusive Tourism as a Special Topic

This section introduces:

• Inclusive tourism principles
• Marginalized groups as consumers and producers
• Examples of firms and destinations redesigning experiences, not just infrastructure

VIII. Additional Resources for Deepening Learning

The closing section curates:

• Academic and practitioner articles
• Managerial readings
• Talks and videos
• A carefully selected list of novels, memoirs, and nonfiction books to build empathy and perspective-taking

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Ever since Leonardo da Vinci pioneered the drawing technique that shows the interior of machines, the method has been used for various practices, including visual displays of consumer products such as Do-It-Yourself (DIY) furniture (e.g., IKEA), car repair manuals (e.g., Haynes Manual), toys (e.g., LEGO and Meccano), and in advertising various consumer gadgets.

In a , we term this form of depicting a product as “anatomical depiction”—a technique that unveils the focal product’s anatomy, which is normally not visible to the consumer. In the wake of high-profile product failures making headlines, anatomical depiction in advertisements can boost consumer confidence in product performance and increase the perception of product worth. This is especially vital because traditional ideas like warranties and money-back guarantees are proving costly and other approaches to provide complicated product information run the risk of increasing confusion.

We explore the effectiveness of using anatomical depictions in marketing with nine experiments in various settings, including an online peer-to-peer selling platform, social media advertising, and online and lab studies. The experiments cut across different product categories like tech gadgets (smartwatches, headphones), wearables (shoes), home appliances (hair straighteners, air purifiers), and furniture (mattresses) with varied consumer samples.

Customer Segments Receptive to Anatomical Depiction

Our research suggests that anatomical depictions can help companies build customer confidence more efficiently during the product adoption phase. Marketers can simply add anatomical depictions to product pages or use them as thumbnails for new products.

However, our research also provides information about which customers are most receptive to anatomical depiction. This mode of advertising works well for tech-savvy consumers by increasing their purchase intentions, but it can sometimes reduce the confidence of those anxious about technology.

Our research also suggests that the effectiveness of anatomical depiction depends on what consumers are looking for. When shoppers focus on high-performance, such as the sound quality of wireless speakers, seeing the internal components can increase their willingness to pay. However, if they are looking for aesthetic aspects such as visual design, it may not make a difference. Therefore, we recommend using anatomical depictions for products marketed for their practical benefits rather than purely aesthetic ones.

Lessons for Chief Marketing Officers

The study offers the following lessons for business leaders and advertisers.

• Helping customers better appreciate the manufacturer’s point-of-view can deliver positive outcomes. For instance, the successful 2009 launch of the unibody Mac can be attributed to how Apple highlighted the novel design and manufacturing process in its advertising campaign. By helping consumers visualize this process, the brand was able to successfully differentiate its new line of laptops using the inner structure as a unique selling proposition. Anatomical depiction offers a similarly subtle and effective “visual language” for persuasion.

• Compared to other strategies such as warranties and money-back guarantees, anatomical depiction offers a broader and relatively more cost-effective avenue to boost consumer confidence in product performance.

• Firms intending to use anatomical depiction might be better served in targeting consumer segments who are relatively more ready to adopt technology. It is important to remember that anatomical depiction could decrease confidence in product performance for extremely technology-anxious consumers.

• Managers should exercise caution when employing anatomical depictions if their products are positioned to provide primarily hedonic benefits (e.g., fashionable suitcase, stylish speaker).

How confident consumers feel about a product’s performance significantly influences their decisions to adopt it. Our research shows that anatomical depictions provide a subtle and effective way to persuade consumers. This method is versatile, working well across various communication channels, including digital, print, and multimedia. Importantly, this research has broader implications for how products are presented during the adoption phase, which can influence consumer confidence and risk management.

Marketing scholars can extend this study by exploring ways to sell products that do not have a clear internal structure. For example, a slice of pizza may not necessarily have a clear internal structure and the anatomical composition of a pizza may not play a critical role in impacting actual taste. Examining processes in such contexts could yield new insights into how anatomical depiction affects different, but conceptually related, outcomes such as perceived taste and food valuation.

Source: Seo Yoon Kang, Junghan Kim, and Arun Lakshmanan, “,” Journal of Marketing.

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In 2011, the online education industry catered to around 300,000 consumers. In 2021, it served 220 million, thanks in part to increased enrollment during the COVID-19 pandemic. Traditional universities and institutions are increasingly adopting hybrid course formats. For example, the number of full-time online MBA students surpassed in-person MBA students for the first time in the 2020-21 academic year.

Today, online educational platforms like Coursera and edX offer a range of flexible course content, but these firms are faced with a tricky question: Should they release content through a scheduled format that resembles a traditional university course with a subset of lectures and quizzes available at the start of each week, or should they follow in the footsteps of Netflix and Hulu with an on-demand release strategy where all the material is immediately available upon registration?

Exploring this question in a , we find that the choice of format for content release not only impacts overall user engagement and firm revenue but also user performance and learning outcomes.

Our team studied over 67,000 users taking an introductory marketing course on Coursera consisting of 32 short lecture videos and four quizzes. Our study took advantage of a natural experiment policy change where the platform switched the course from a scheduled format to an on-demand release format while keeping the actual content the same.

The scheduled format closely resembled a traditional university course, with some of the study material available at the beginning of each week for four weeks. Under the on-demand format, all four weeks of content was made available upon registration. All users could take the course for free or opt into paying for a completion certificate, as a one-time fee in the scheduled format and a monthly subscription in the on-demand format.

More Users, Less Engagement

Our findings show that the switch to on-demand content doubled the percentage of paying users from 14% to 28%. Thus, the on-demand format was successful in increasing short-term firm revenue by bringing in more paying users. On the downside, the switch resulted in significantly lower lecture completion rates (three fewer lectures on average) and lower quiz performance (10% lower scores).

The on-demand format also negatively impacted downstream platform engagement. The marketing course was promoted in a “Business Foundations” set with three other courses on operations, accounting, and finance. Compared to users in the scheduled format, those in the on-demand format ended up taking one or two fewer additional courses six months after the focal marketing course.

Our analysis of user activity reveals two new learning patterns:

• First, a subset (13%) of users in the on-demand format continued to return and take quizzes well beyond the recommended 4-week course period. The greater flexibility in the on-demand content release and payment structure likely enabled these users to “stretch out” their consumption.

• Second, the on-demand format increased the practice of binging, with user activity being clumped together (i.e., more binging) as compared to being evenly spaced out (i.e., less binging). In the scheduled format, binging was negatively related to course performance, which is consistent with the intuition that binging reflects procrastination or cramming. However, in the on-demand format, binging was positively related to performance, suggesting that on-demand users may binge as a form of strategic time management by setting aside time to consume in spurts.

Real-World Implications

Our study offers vital lessons for chief marketing officers in the online education space:

• The switch to the on-demand format attracted a set of users who were more likely to pay but were less engaged in the course. Our results show that on-demand content is potentially helpful at bringing in a new user segment or expanding the current user base, similar to universities offering concurrent hybrid MBAs that cater to busy students with full-time jobs. Managers must consider the trade-off between offering structure versus flexibility and may even consider offering different content release options simultaneously, but at different price points by emphasizing their unique features.

• Platforms may need to adapt their content to account for users who binge on content and others who space it out over time. For example, firms can include more recaps or reviews to reduce frustration resulting from users forgetting content. It may even be a viable strategy to embrace the prevalence of binging among users by highlighting or designing sets of lectures that are “bingeable” versus more modular.

• Many online platforms offer episodic content that may be released in installments and thus need to make decisions regarding the content release format. Our work provides insights that help managers anticipate the potential consequences of such decisions. On-demand content offers clear short-term benefits in terms of increased revenue but potentially long-term costs in terms of decreased engagement and new challenges in maintaining user engagement.

From: Joy Lu, Eric T. Bradlow, and J. Wesley Hutchinson, “,” Journal of Marketing.

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Consumers make numerous decisions every day, with consequences in the near or distant future. Some decisions that result in farsighted behaviors—decisions involving immediate costs but offering delayed benefits—can be critical in promoting consumer well-being. However, consumers face challenges when attempting to adopt such farsighted behaviors, primarily because the immediate costs loom larger and overshadow any prospective benefits. For example, deciding whether and when to start saving for retirement involves many decisions that can act as barriers and prevent consumers from enrolling in an investment plan to achieve financial security.

To counteract this, marketers commonly use precommitment strategies by inviting consumers to choose between adopting the farsighted behavior immediately or in the future (i.e., now vs. later). Providing the option to “do it later” can make the decision feel less costly, thus reducing the aversive feelings consumers experience and nudging them to partake in farsighted behaviors. If this conventional wisdom holds, one would expect precommitment strategies to consistently facilitate the adoption of farsighted behaviors. However, in a , researchers find that these strategies can sometimes backfire, depending on how marketers display precommitment choice options to consumers.

Design and Urgency in Consumer Choices

The researchers identify the role of urgency as a novel explanation for why certain types of precommitment strategies can fail to produce intended results: The temporal order of the choice display influences the implicit level of urgency that a marketer signals to consumers to engage in farsighted behavior. Specifically, when precommitment options to save now versus later for retirement are displayed simultaneously, or side-by-side, it can coincidentally reduce adoption of the behavior change (i.e., saving) because consumers infer that the way in which the choices are presented signals that it isn’t urgent for them to engage in these behaviors. In other words, when both options are visible to consumers at the same time, they are less likely to engage in farsighted behavior because they infer the marketer is signaling that it isn’t urgent to do so.

When both options are visible to consumers at the same time, they are less likely to engage in farsighted behavior because they infer the marketer is signaling that it isn’t urgent to do so.

In contrast, sequential precommitment options that display a single option to adopt the behavior now, followed by the option to adopt the behavior later only if the consumer initially declines, signals a greater sense of urgency to encourage consumers to adopt the farsighted behaviors. The researchers conducted a multisite field experiment and two lab studies, finding that the sequential precommitment strategy is more effective than using a simultaneous precommitment strategy or no precommitment strategy at all.

When designing choice sets to encourage precommitment, marketers and policymakers are often tempted to provide the option for consumers to choose to “do it later,” as doing so can reduce the psychological burden consumers bear in the present. However, this research suggests that such a strategy could fail because people may feel that it is not urgent to engage in this behavior. Offering the option to “do it now” and then “do it later” only if consumers decline can boost the effectiveness of precommitment offers and, ultimately, nudge consumers along the continuum to adopt vital behaviors that can contribute to their prosperity and well-being. When implementing interventions, practitioners should think through what might be signaled by the intervention, as the way to communicate offers can ultimately impact consumers’ decision making.

We go behind the scenes with two of the authors to learn more about their perspectives on the benefits of collaborating with practitioners to solve real problems in the marketplace, the surprising result that inspired their theory development, and to receive advice on the importance of crafting a message that sticks.

Q: Can you talk about some of the benefits and challenges that researchers and practitioners collaborating to conduct research may encounter when embarking on designing and conducting a field experiment?

A: We think a major challenge for academic researchers and practitioners collaborating on field experiments is that there can be potentially competing sets of objectives that aren’t completely aligned. So, the researchers are interested in conducting a study that is linked to theory and that somehow informs theory through testing hypotheses. The practitioners find that perfectly interesting, but they also want to make sure that the research project is something that helps them deliver the results that are a key part of their business and broadly learn how they can be the best marketers that they can be in their particular context. Those perspectives don’t necessarily conflict, but sometimes they do. For example, sometimes, a researcher’s hypothesis might be best tested with a variation on the status quo that is less effective than what is being done in practice. You don’t want to intentionally subject your wonderful practitioner-collaborator to that. Although this is initially framed as a challenge, it can also be a very important benefit because it really disciplines us as academic researchers to make sure that what we’re doing has direct practical implications.

Q: Can you elaborate on why you incorporated an incentive compatible design in Study 3 and why you thought it was important to align the participants’ incentives with the design of the intervention and marketplace goals in general?

A: We anticipated that it would be difficult for consumers to accurately simulate their actual behavior in the context that we studied. For farsighted decisions—like enrolling in a retirement plan, getting a flu vaccine, or updating your antivirus software in a prompt way, as opposed to putting it off for weeks and months—there are competing ways that people think about their options. For example, “In this moment, right now, what is going to be the easiest? What is going to be the most expedient? What is going to be the most immediately rewarding with the least upfront cost?” That’s what I want to do in this visceral way right now. As opposed to: “What I should do if I were to step back and reflect, and think about the all-in costs and benefits integrated from now over the infinite horizon, probabilistically weighted over how long I’m going to survive with some appropriate but mild rate of intertemporal preference.”

Because we know that there are these two competing ways of approaching these sorts of decisions when we’re asking about it in a scenario study, we don’t have a lot of confidence regarding which of those approaches participants are going to be accessing when they’re responding to the scenario that we put them in. We’re interested in the ultimate impact of our types of precommitment on decisions that people take, and we wanted more confidence that the objectives and motivations that we’re ascribing to participants are what are driving their decisions when they’re generating data in our studies. Because it’s incentive compatible, we’re capturing whichever mode of decision making is actually driving the behavior, which we felt was particularly important in our context because it allows us to test our full theory while looking at real decisions with real stakes.

Q: What do you hope to see changed in the marketplace because of your research?

A: As a direct implication, when marketers offer precommitment, we think it’s likely going to lead to higher enrollment rates if they choose a sequential design rather than a simultaneous design.

More broadly, when marketers or choice architects design interventions, they might implicitly signal some information about their beliefs and motivations, and consumers use that implicit information when making their decisions. For example, even if the marketers didn’t realize it when they were designing precommitments by offering simultaneous options side by side, it signaled a lack of urgency. We think this applies to other interventions as well.

So, in the design process, when trying to take an idea from behavioral science or psychology and integrate it into a field setting to produce positive behavioral change, it’s important to first audit that intervention and think through the potential negative inferences or negative pieces of information that might be signaled by this intervention, then redesign to try to guard against those potential negative inferences before running the intervention across a large group of people in the field. Auditing before scaling is something that our paper advocates for, and we think it can be very useful in applied behavioral science.

Q: Were there any “behind the scenes” stories that do not appear in the paper that might be interesting to share with us? Any surprising or “aha” moments?

A: When we were talking with the record keeper that implemented our field experiment to build on the idea of precommitment that Shlomo Benartzi had pioneered with Richard Thaler in their paper “,” we thought we could leverage behavioral insights to help people save. Specifically, pushing things off into the future takes advantage of present bias. Those upfront costs for saving—the sacrifice of current consumption—that loom large are now pushed off into the future, making them less onerous. In the original implementations of “Save More Tomorrow,” in meetings with their clients, financial advisors first offered the option to save now, and then only if their clients declined to save now, the advisors offered precommitment. What became very clear is that the sort of communication occurring between an advisor and potential plan participants was something that wouldn’t as easily scale in the settings that we were looking at because it’s costly for a plan advisor to sit down with individuals. So, we were thinking, “Why don’t we scale up the idea by making it much lower cost? We’re going to do it over mailers.” Here’s where this was a blind spot of ours: We thought, “We can’t do this back and forth consisting of interactions between the advisor and the investor when we’re just sending out a letter. Why don’t we just collapse it all into what we now call “simultaneous precommitment.” We’ll offer you the now option and the later option to increase your savings rate, all on the same page.”

That was a situation where our research ambition met with the reality of what a record keeper and these plan sponsors could do, and we inadvertently changed the psychology of the precommitment design that we thought we were going to study. We think it turned out much more exciting this way. What we now call simultaneous precommitment led to less savings because it caused people to start saving later. That’s when we concentrated on figuring out our best understanding of why this might be going on.

Q: What kind of strategies did you use to effectively communicate your focal message and primary findings? Do you have any tips for practitioners or junior scholars who want to refine their communication tactics?

A: All the authors were really focused on the fact that we were communicating something that was potentially complex. We spent a lot of time trying to reduce complexity and make it as understandable as possible. Making the abstract concrete is probably the best strategy. Although “sequential” and “simultaneous” are nice words and accurate words, sometimes a picture is the best way for people to see the idea. The visuals we added to the paper really helped to distill our ideas into something tangible for readers (i.e., see Figure 1 on page 1096). Another strategy is to continue to revise until your work feels like something that someone who has never even thought about your topic before can pick up and easily understand. If something seems complex to us, it’s going to be even more complicated for the readers who are unfamiliar with the topic.

Read the full article:

Joseph Reiff, Hengchen Dai, John Beshears, Katherine L. Milkman, and Shlomo Benartzi (2023), “,” Journal of Marketing Research, 60 (6), 1095–113. doi:.

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What connects the recent Barbie movie, the return of McDonald’s Grimace, Pepsi’s adoption of an ’80s style logo, and Clairol’s partnership with Amazon Prime’s “Daisy Jones & The Six?” They all tap into the past, reminding us of simpler and happier times.

It is impossible to ignore the resurgence of nostalgia in brands and advertising. Nostalgia is all around us, from the products we use to the commercials we watch, and this trend is not limited to fast food giants or beauty products. Chex Mix’s remix of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” and Old Bay Goldfish’s remake of Lisa Loeb’s “Stay (I Missed You)” take us back to the ’90s. Even Rakuten’s 2023 “Clueless” Super Bowl teaser and Netflix’s “Stranger Things” series are loaded with references to the past. Nostalgia is an emotion that consumers are embracing and that brands are ingeniously using to connect with their audience.

In a , we explore the power of nostalgia and how brands can use references to the past to establish emotional bonds with today’s consumers. Our study does not revolve around products or music but focuses on vintage typography and the role it plays in establishing an emotional connection with consumers through nostalgia and, in turn, enhancing consumers’ perceptions of product safety. Although it may appear a minor aspect in marketing and advertising, typography extends beyond aesthetics. It plays a pivotal role in shaping how people think, feel, behave, evaluate brands, and make choices.

An Emotional Connection to the Past

We have discovered that vintage typography can trigger what we term “vintage anemoia,” a unique form of vicarious nostalgia. This describes a consumer’s emotional connection to the past and appreciation for the aesthetics, fashion, styles, design, and cultural elements associated with vintage cues.

This connection is irrespective of a specific historical period or individual lived experiences. In other words, vintage typography can evoke a nostalgic response from consumers, regardless of their ability to draw from childhood memories or specific historical events. Vintage typography, through its reference to the past, evokes the feelings of the “good old days”—quality, beauty, and happiness associated with the past, whatever that past may be for the individual consumer.

People are yearning for a connection to a time when life was less complicated. In an era marked by uncertainty, from economic and political instability to public health challenges like the COVID-19 pandemic, people seek the simplicity and stability of the past. Nostalgia provides a sense of comfort, making people feel safe and secure. Our research findings show that when consumers experience vintage anemoia after seeing vintage typography in an advertisement, brand logo, or packaging, they perceive the brand’s product’s to be safer.

We explore the effects of vintage typography and vintage anemoia on consumer product safety perceptions in seven studies. Our research reveals that consumers have a more positive attitude toward brands that incorporate vintage typography. They are more likely to purchase the brand’s products and are willing to pay more for them due to the perception that the products are safer.

Our research reveals that consumers have a more positive attitude toward brands that incorporate vintage typography. They are more likely to purchase the brand’s products and are willing to pay more for them due to the perception that the products are safer.

The Power of Implicit Cues

However, the effectiveness of vintage typography is context dependent. It does not work when the establishment year of a brand is shown because vintage anemoia relies on implicit cues to establish links to one’s past. Vintage typography is also ineffective for inducing vintage anemoia when promoting futuristic products because this diverts consumer attention away from the past, weakening the nostalgic effect.

In summary, our research offers the following valuable lessons for marketers:

• Vintage typography has the potential to evoke nostalgia and enhance perceptions of safety.

• Brands looking to emphasize safety or address safety concerns associated with their products can benefit from vintage typography, which not only promotes nostalgia but also positively influences perceptions of product safety.

• Vintage typography is more than just aesthetics; it is a strategic tool for creating strong emotional connections with consumers and shaping consumer perceptions.

• Brands should thoughtfully consider their positioning, consumer associations, and product attributes before adopting vintage typography.

By aligning vintage aesthetics with their goals and avoiding potential pitfalls, marketers can harness the emotional power of nostalgia to create stronger emotional connections with consumers and enhance safety perceptions.

From: Alicia Kulczynski and Margurite Hook, “,” Journal of Marketing.

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Designing products is both an art and a science. Companies have found that bringing together many visual elements in product design—with multiple colors, text, and illustrations incorporated in the packaging—can lead to enhanced brand engagement. However, in the last few years, consumers have increasingly desired more minimalist aesthetics. 

In a , we examine this consumer trend toward minimalist packaging in consumable products. We theorize that consumers tend to assume that the simplicity of the product package suggests that the product contains few ingredients, which in turn increases the belief that the essential ingredients of the product are undiluted. With customers increasingly seeking product purity, there is an increase in a willingness to pay for consumable products with simple packaging.

We define simple packaging design as the extent to which a product package contains few design elements that lack detail, are similar to one another, and are arranged in regular ways. Complex packaging design refers to the extent to which a product package contains many design elements that are highly detailed, different from one another, and arranged in irregular ways. We examined over 1,000 consumable product packages from the largest supermarket chain in the U.S. and find that the simplicity of the packaging design is positively associated with price. A series of experiments show that increased willingness to pay for products in simple packaging is due to consumers often assuming that simple packaging signals few ingredients, which enhances perceived product purity.

Increased willingness to pay for products in simple packaging is due to consumers often assuming that simple packaging signals few ingredients, which enhances perceived product purity.

However, simple packaging does not always enhance consumers’ willingness to pay. We find that store-brand products are not likely to experience the same benefits of simple packaging as non-store brand products. This is likely because the simplicity of the product package aligns with consumers’ default assumption that store brands invest less in product quality. Thus, the simplicity of store brand packaging likely signals a lack of investment in the product rather than few ingredients and product purity.

The Role of Consumer Goals

We also find the preference for simple packaging depends on consumers’ goals. When consumers have a health goal, they are more likely to pay for a product with simple packaging. This is because simple packaging conveys that the product contains few ingredients and high product purity—attributes that tend to be associated with healthy products. In contrast, when consumers seek to indulge, they are less willing to pay for products with simple packaging. This is because complex packaging signals many ingredients and low product purity—attributes that tend to be associated with unhealthy (and, by extension, tasty) products.

Our research extends the understanding of consumer interest in minimalist aesthetics by showing conditions under which design simplicity can be less desirable. Visual simplicity often conveys the idea of “less is more,” but there are situations when it can simply signal “less is less.” Our work also broadens the understanding of the concept of purity in the context of consumer research. While explicit illustrations, such as a drawing of a mountain spring, can enhance consumer judgments of product purity, we find that product purity can be inferred from more subtle visual cues (that is, the lack of visual design elements). Relatedly, we dig deep into the concept of product purity, which can hold a variety of meanings, and differentiate purity from its related construct of naturalness, which typically refers to products that are not man-made.

Lessons for CMOs

Our research provides several insights for chief marketing officers:

• Simplifying package design can be an effective way for brands to visually (and nonverbally) communicate key product information to consumers. Simple packaging can lead consumers to infer that the product has fewer ingredients and is purer, thereby enhancing their willingness to pay.

• Aligning the visual design of the product package with ingredient information is essential to make a positive impact on consumers.

• Managers may consider the specific brand when using simple packaging because positive inferences are less likely to occur for store-brand products.

• When managers want to signal that their products are indulgent, opting for more complex designs could be more effective.

Our work could be extended to durable goods such as technology products. For instance, Apple products are well-known for their simple packaging and are often seen as easier to use than their competitors. It may be fruitful to explore how inferences derived from simple packaging of technology products align or differ from those of consumable goods.

From: Lan Anh N. Ton, Rosanna K. Smith, and Julio Sevilla, “,” Journal of Marketing.

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Imagine designing a pair of sneakers and having them delivered in a few days. Studies have shown that compared to “off-the-shelf” products of similar quality, customization leads to better preference fit and greater identification with a product. Self-designing products with co-creation configurators allows consumers to obtain the exact product they want—no compromise. Self-designing is fun, and consumers experience pride and feelings of accomplishment when they are part of the process. As a result, they have a high additional willingness to pay.

But there’s one big problem with this: Abandonment rates are perplexingly high. Data from 32 million customers across 18 countries shows that consumers prematurely abandon 95% of co-creation processes. Similarly, in an analysis of 15 German business-to-consumer configurators in categories as diverse as jewelry, spices, candles, and lingerie, abandonment rates ranged from 88 to 99%.

In a , we explore this contradiction between theory and practice. We measure individuals’ momentary emotional state continuously and unobtrusively on the basis of their facial expressions. Across six experiments where participants used different real configurators in different product categories, we employed FaceReader technology and an array of methods such as think-aloud protocols, automatic sentiment analysis, and survival analysis.

To quantify the problem, we conducted a survey of 771 American consumers who had abandoned self-designing a product with an online configurator at least once. We instructed them to think of the last time they abandoned such a process in each category and asked them to reveal their initial intentions (such as “before starting the configuration process…I had considered buying a self-designed [type of product]”). We collected information on 1,494 abandoned self-design processes. In 650 cases, consumers had been “shoppers” with no real interest in buying the product from the outset (44%); thus, their abandonment did not mean lost sales. However, in 844 cases (56%), consumers had at least considered buying the product when starting. Which bring us to the important question: Why do so many consumers leave prematurely when the academic evidence presented thus far suggests customization is supposedly so rewarding?

Beware the Valley of Death

Our findings show that consumers’ experiences are an emotional rollercoaster when self-designing. At first, expectations are high, which is why consumers begin the self-design process in the first place. However, their optimism and positive affect decreases quickly and they realize, to their frustration, that their interim design solutions are far from perfect and that the process of self-designing is less enjoyable than anticipated. Over-optimism gives way to under-optimism and consumers are not aware that they will learn more about their preferences and be more familiar with the configurator if they persist and continue self-designing. This momentary frustration and shortsightedness lead many to abandon the customization process prematurely. The perception that they have already invested some effort into self-designing does not create enough of a “lock-in” to prevent them from stopping the process. It is the consumers who overcome this “valley of death” in the U-shaped curve who gain the potential value from self-designing and regain a positive emotional state.

When participants successfully completed the self-designing process, they looked back on both the outcome and process positively. Which tells us that self-designing does indeed create high value for consumers—but only after completion.

Lessons for Chief Marketing Officers

What can companies learn from this study? How can they change the behavior of self-design configurators to reduce the abandonment problem?

• Consumers who get positive social feedback (e.g., the short message, “Wow. Great design. Looks really good. I like it a lot,” by another consumer who is online) in the critical phase after a few minutes show significantly lower abandonment rates. However, positive feedback that is automatically generated has no such effect, no matter the form in which it is delivered.

• Companies can think of integrating an online community to their self-design configurator. The added risk is that not all real peer feedback will be positive, potentially flipping the positive effect. Therefore, companies might consider hiring consumers for their benevolent feedback.

• Companies might consider the possibility of simulating real peer consumer feedback. Rapidly progressing generative artificial intelligence possibilities make this a tempting option, although a number of ethical issues will warrant consideration before deciding to take this course.

Future research can potentially investigate additional ways of helping consumers overcome the critical phase in self-design processes. One possibility would be to provide attractive starting designs that only need to be refined and adapted rather than starting from scratch. If these starting solutions somewhat match consumers’ preferences, consumers may start with a design they already like and be more likely to complete it.

From: Franziska Krause and Nikolaus Franke, “,” Journal of Marketing.

Go to the Journal of Marketing

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