Seeing the Forest or the Trees? The Impact of Global and Local Processing Styles on Consumer Responses to New Products

为了获得竞争优势，公司花费数十亿美元开发新产品并将其投放市场。尽管有这些巨大的投资，新产品的失败率仍然很高。在此背景下，大量研究考察了消费者如何评价和采用新产品，以及公司如何提高新产品开发的有效性。然而，这篇文献的一个局限性是，没有研究消费者对新产品的接受如何受到他们的心理镜头的影响，也就是他们心理上处理与新产品有关的信息的方式。在这个提案中，我们建立了一个概念模型，认为消费者可以以全局的方式(即从产品的整体配置开始，然后向下工作)或以局部的方式(即从产品的细节开始，然后直到全局配置)来处理新产品，并且这些不同的处理方式可能会影响他们的评价。特别是，概念模型试图解决三个相互关联的问题：(1)现有研究表明，消费者对新产品的反应受到消费者能够获得与理解产品潜在相关的先前知识的程度的影响。然而，目前尚不清楚不同的加工风格是否以及在多大程度上会通过促进或阻碍适当的知识结构的转移来影响新产品的评价。(2)虽然消费者可能因为新产品的创新效益而被吸引，但研究也发现，消费者在购买新产品后不久就会丢弃它们，因为他们没有学会正确使用它们。因此，我们试图更好地了解消费者是如何学习使用复杂产品的，以及不同的加工风格可能如何影响这一学习过程。(3)最后，虽然现有的关于全球和本地加工的研究可能有助于解释消费者对新产品的反应，但很少有研究可以指导企业在应用背景下实施这些发现。因此，我们想要研究企业如何在新产品营销中系统地触发不同的处理风格。鉴于研究项目的广度，我们将通过一系列不同的实验方法来测试加工风格对消费者对新产品反应的影响。也就是说，我们不仅将进行一些实验室研究，让消费者评估对新产品的口头描述，而且还将致力于设计一些研究，要求消费者参与新产品原型，并观察他们如何学习使用产品的功能。这些研究不仅可能产生重要的理论见解，还可能表明企业如何通过指导消费者的加工风格来提高新产品推出的有效性。

To gain a competitive advantage, companies spend billions of dollars on developing new products and launching them on the market. Despite these enormous investments, failure rates for new products are substantial. Against this background, a broad body of research has examined how consumers evaluate and adopt new products and how companies can increase the effectiveness of new product development. One limitation of this literature, however, is that is has not examined how consumer acceptance of new products is influenced by their psychological lens, that is, by the manner in which they mentally process information relating to new products. In this proposal, we develop a conceptual model that argues that consumers may process new products in a global manner (i.e., beginning with the overall configuration of a product and then working downward toward the details) or a local manner (i.e., beginning with the details of a product and then working up to a global configuration) and that these different processing styles may affect their evaluations. In particular, the conceptual model seeks to address three interrelated issues: (1) Existing research suggests that responses to a new product are affected by the extent to which consumers are able to access prior knowledge that is potentially relevant for understanding the product. However, it is unclear if and to what extent different processing styles may affect new product evaluation by facilitating or hindering the transfer of appropriate knowledge structures. (2) While consumers may be drawn to new products because of their innovative benefits, studies have also found that consumers often discard new products shortly after they have purchased them because they do not learn to use them properly. Hence, we seek to develop a better understanding of how consumers learn to use complex products and how different processing styles may affect this learning process. (3) Lastly, whereas existing studies on global and local processing may help to explain how consumers respond to new products, there is little research that can guide firms in implementing these findings in an applied context. Thus, we want to examine how firms can systematically trigger different processing styles in new product marketing. Given the breadth of the research program, we will test the effects of processing styles on consumer responses to new products through a range of different experimental methods. That is, we will not only conduct a number of laboratory studies where consumers will evaluate verbal descriptions of new products, but also aim to design a number of studies where we will ask consumers to engage with a new product prototype and will observe how they learn to use the features of the product. These studies may not only yield important theoretical insights, but may also show how firms can increase the effectiveness of new product launches by guiding consumer processing styles.