Design and Apparent Production Costs

Min, Liu, and Anderson found that “Brands and retailers often offer different aesthetic versions of the same base product that vary from visually simple to visually complex. . . . Consumers associate simple (vs. complex) visual aesthetics with lower production costs when evaluating different aesthetic versions of a product. . . . An important downstream implication of this lay belief is that consumers’ willingness to pay is lower for visually simple (vs. complex) versions. This gap in willingness to pay occurs even when consumers like both product versions or aesthetics equally, and it is only eliminated when consumers like the visually simple version substantially more than the complex version. Finally, reducing the diagnosticity of the lay belief by disclosing information that the two versions took similar amounts of production time and effort reduces the gap in willingness to pay between visually simple (vs. complex) versions.”
Lauren Min, Peggy Liu, and Cary Anderson. “The Visual Complexity = Higher Production Cost Lay Belief.” Journal of Consumer Research, in press, https://doi.org/10.1093/jcr/ucae044