Let's Keep It Simple! The Influence of Minimalistic Product Design on Innovation Adoption

摘要

An increasing number of innovative products remain unsuccessful in terms of their economic outcome (Ogawa and Piller 2006). Consumers expect high learning costs for innovations which represent a significant barrier in the adoption process (Gourville 2006; Mukherjee and Hoyer 2001; Farrell and Shapiro 1988). Product innovations for their part can be divided into really new products (RNP) and incrementally new products (INP) (Freeman and Perez 1988). These alternative forms differ mainly in terms of the perceived level of novelty. RNPs are regarded as "groundbreaking innovations" (Dahl and Hoeffler 2004; Moreau et al. 2001). In contrast to that, INPs are improvements of existing products from the consumer's everyday life and are therefore lower on the innovation scale. Drawing on literature about processing fluency (Schwarz 2004), we argue that the level of design complexity influences the perceived ease of use of a product innovation, the expected learning costs and thus the consumer's preference for this product.