Individuals Perceptions and Evaluations of Consumer Products - Tom White, supervised by Lukasz Walasek

This grant has supported our ongoing work on how individuals derive hedonic and utilitarian value from common consumer products, and how this may be influenced by consumption-based individual differences. Using different methodologies to elicit people’s perceptions of consumer goods, we seek to understand how Hedonic Shopping Motivation and Material Values, (as well as several other exploratory variables) 1) influence the hedonic and utilitarian evaluations of consumer products, and 2) influence the judged similarity of consumer products.

Project Outcomes:

This ongoing project intends to show that product attributes alone are not solely responsible for how consumer products are perceived and evaluated. We intend to show that naturally occurring shopping orientations, and the degree to which material possessions play an important role in individual’s lives are instrumental in the way that individual’s represent consumer products. Specifically, we hypothesised that high scorers on our scales will perceive, represent and evaluate products differently to low scorers. 

Thus far we have conducted two experiments (one pre-registered) where we asked participants to rate how hedonic and how utilitarian 40 consumer products are and then complete two scales designed to measure their Hedonic Shopping Motivation and Material Values. These studies have shown (and replicated) that participants who score highly on the scales evaluate consumer products significantly differently from low scorers, supporting our hypothesis. 

Secondly, we have conducted two further experiments (one pre-registered) where we asked participants to spatially arrange consumer products (as words) on screen with similar products placed closer together and dissimilar products placed further apart. Participants then completed the same two scales as in our previous studies. These studies and have shown (and replicated) that participants who derive more hedonic value from shopping and owning material goods group products together in significantly different (looser) clusters compared to low scorers, again supporting our hypothesis.

The replicated outcomes of this ongoing project have led to new ideas for further investigation being developed, as well as collaboration opportunities with another institution/department. We are currently ideating a follow up study utilising another methodology to explore our discovered effects further.  

We now seek to understand if individual’s scores on the consumption-based individual difference scales can be predicted from the way that participants describe consumption experiences and products specifically using large language models. In light of this new direction we wish to take our work in, we have started an initial collaboration with a marketing academic from Stanford Business School (USA) who has used similar methods previously. We believe we can learn from their previous work, and we have already collaborated on a small pilot study with them building on their work, and they have applied some of their alternative analysis methods to our pilot data in an exploratory manner. These initial small projects have enabled us to start building an effective working relationship and we look forward to collaborating fully on a new project in the coming months. 

The output of our first four studies, which this funding grant supported, are now in the process of being written into a manuscript for publication. We are aiming to publish with the Journal of Consumer Research. Additionally I have presented a small segment (10 mins) of our work at a recent British Psychological Society conference.