WYSIWYG—Seeing is Believing: Consumer Responses to Levels of Design Newness, Product Innovativeness, and the Role of Country-of-Origin

ABSTRACTThere is a dearth of new product design research that investigates the impact of varying levels of design newness coupled with technical newness on consumer evaluations for incremental and radical innovations across utilitarian and hedonic product categories through the lens of country-of-origin (COO). In today's world, innovation may originate from both developed and emerging economies. Our research investigates consumer responses when incrementally new and/or radically new products come from developed as well as developing countries. Through four experimental studies, we found that consumers preferred high level of design newness in incrementally innovative utilitarian product category and low level of design newness in radically innovative utilitarian product category when products originate from developed countries (developed COO situation). High level of design newness was preferred for both incrementally new and really (radically) new utilitarian products originating from developing countrie...