Can’t See the Forest For the Trees: Increased Local Processing in Mass Customization Systems

Consumers never before had the opportunity to customize such a wide variety of products. An increasing number of companies are offering web-based services that allow customers to design their own customized products. Allowing people to express their preferences attribute-by-attribute can benefit consumers and retailers by decreasing the complexity of choice, increasing product satisfaction, and leading to greater purchase likelihood (Huffman and Kahn 1998; Schreier 2006; Valenzuela, Dhar, and Zettelmeyer 2009). However, providing such opportunities for customization may not be uniformly beneficial to all consumers. For example, consumers’ responses to customized offers may be affected by their degree of preference development as well as their insight into their own preferences (Simonson 2005). In this paper, we argue that the type of configuration format predominantly used in mass customization (MC) systems can lead to more local information processing, ultimately leading to decreased purchase intentions and diminished post-choice evaluations of the configured product. This research builds on prior work demonstrating that information processing styles can easily be triggered by and carried over to other tasks (Förster and Dannenberg 2010). Most MC systems are designed as a bottom-up process where consumers configure their product in multiple sequential steps by choosing feature or style elements attribute-by-attribute. For instance, to configure a car, a consumer would first select the model type, then the exterior color, followed by the type of rims, and so on. Focusing on a sequence of individual attributes rather than the complete product may trigger more local processing, as consumers engage in less mental simulation of the whole configuration. Such sequential processing can increase consumer’s hopes (Mogilner, Shiv, and Iyengar 2013), inadvertently leading to suboptimal choice outcomes. Moreover, focusing on each attribute likely reduces mental simulation which has been shown to impact post-choice evaluations (Escalas 2004). In contrast, choosing from a set of ‘off the shelf’ alternatives (by-alternative) likely increases global processing, as consumers can see the product in a more holistic manner and make cross-attribute comparisons simultaneously. This focus on the product as a whole better enables consumers to select a product whose attributes fit well together. Thus, contrary to intuition, customizing a product can make consumers worse off in some circumstances than simply choosing from available alternatives.