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We ran the experiment among 123 consumers from the same panel used in the first experiment.įirst, we experimentally increased participants desire for control. So in our second experiment we investigated whether such events could also change consumers’ willingness to accept new products. For example, consumers feel a stronger desire for control when something threatens their sense of control (e.g. While desire for control varies from one individual to another, a given consumer may also experience different degrees of needing control across different contexts. This preliminary evidence suggested that consumers with a higher desire for control are more hesitant to try new products. However, for the “classic” toothpaste, the extent to which participants wanted control did not influence their willingness to try the product. We asked everyone to indicate how willing they would be to try the toothpaste.Īmong those who evaluated the “new” toothpaste, willingness to try the product was reduced as desire for control increased. We led half of the participants to believe that the toothpaste was new (positioning it as “The New Formula Toothpaste”), while the other half was led to believe that it was classic (“The Classic Formula Toothpaste”). Then under the guise of a market research study, we provided all of these participants with generic information about a toothpaste product (e.g., minty taste, non-fluoride, animal-friendly). In our first experiment, we recruited 264 members of an online panel of American consumers and measured their desire for control using a personality scale that has been well-established in the psychology literature.

For instance, you can find an ad for a Maserati sports car insisting, “My car has to be fast, smooth, and give me a sense of control” and you can see Micro Focus, a multi national IT consultancy company, emphasizing on its website how its products allow consumers to “Take Back Control.” Marketers, too, have long tried to tap into consumers’ desire for control.

Psychologists have long recognized it as one the most fundamental human needs, and have therefore developed personality scales to measure its strength across individuals.

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Results from a series of experiments (forthcoming in the Journal of Consumer Psychology) suggest that the greater someone’s desire for control, the less willing they’ll be to accept new products.ĭesire for control is the innate motive or need to personally exert control over one’s surrounding environment. We sought to investigate whether more stable, psychological factors, such as consumers’ desire for control, could act as barriers to new product acceptance. More interestingly, these odds seem to have remained stable over the past few decades, suggesting that transient factors, such as the economic climate, cannot fully account for the high rates of failure. However, research is starting to show that this might be the wrong approach.ĭespite the fact that firms spend billions of dollars on developing and marketing new products, these products face persistently high failure rates - often up to 40% to 90%, depending on the product category. Conventional wisdom suggests that marketers should emphasize the novelty of new products to get people to buy them.

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