Women better than men at figuring out unusual products

WASHINGTON - A new consumer analysis has found that women are better than men at figuring out unusual products when they’re among competing items.

“A lot of times when we look at how consumers respond to innovative change in a product’s physical form, we fail to consider that the context where they see the product plays a major role in how they evaluate and interpret it,” said the authors.

Theodore J. Noseworthy, June Cotte, and Seung Hwan Lee from the University of Western Ontario examined consumer reactions to innovative products, like a car without visible wheels or a soft drink packaged in a strange way.

In their experiments, some participants viewed advertisements for normal-looking products, whereas others saw extremely unusual products.

Sometimes the ads for the unusual items were alongside similar products and other times they were alongside completely unrelated products.

“Our results show that women are better than men at figuring out an extremely unusual product, as long as the product is promoted among competing products,” said the authors.

For example, female participants understood that a car without visible wheels was a car if the ad appeared in a magazine with other car ads, while men had trouble.

However, when women used the other ads to identify the unusual products, they had trouble accurately remembering the claims within the ads.

“Women, as compared to men, are more likely to mix in claims from ads for competing products when they are using those products to make sense of an unusual product,” according to the authors.

“There are dramatic differences in how males and females process the advertising context.

“Consumers-female consumers in particular-may be able to understand greater levels of visual incongruity than traditionally thought,” the authors added.

The study appeared in the Journal of Consumer Research. (ANI)