

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.
ALI FARAJI RAD SERIES
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. He teaches in the MBA, EMBA, PhD and Executive Education Programs and is Research Director of the Center on Global Brand Leadership and co-faculty director of the Brand Leadership Program for business executives.Conventional wisdom suggests that marketers should emphasize the novelty of new products to get people to buy them.
ALI FARAJI RAD PROFESSIONAL
He is a past President and Fellow of the Society for Consumer Psychology, the leading professional organization for the advancement of the psychological science of the consumer. His numerous publications are widely cited and have appeared in many leading scholarly journals including the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing Research, the Journal of Consumer Psychology, International Journal of Research in Marketing, Psychological Science, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Personality and Social Psychology Review, and the Review of General Psychology. His most recent research focuses on the role of feelings, emotions and motivation in consumers’ and managers’ judgments and decisions. Professor Pham’s business expertise covers the areas of marketing strategy and management, branding, customer and consumer psychology, trademark psychology, marketing communication, and executive decision making.
