The Effect of a Business-like Personality on the Perceived Performance Quality of Products

Product appearance has been recognized as an important factor for new product success (Hertenstein, Platt, & Veryzer, 2005). A person may prefer a product alternative over others because it appeals to him or her aesthetically (Bloch, 1995; Crilly, Moultrie, & Clarkson, 2004). To design products that are aesthetically appealing, past research on product appearance has strived to uncover which design characteristics (e.g., symmetry, unity, typicality) in the product appearance can influence people’s aesthetic responses (Berlyne, 1971; Blijlevens, Carbon, Mugge, & Schoormans, 2011; Hekkert, Snelders, & Van Wieringen, 2003; Raghubir & Greenleaf, 2006; Veryzer & Hutchinson, 1998). In addition to this aesthetic value, product appearance can have a functional value (Creusen & Schoormans, 2005). People can use product appearance as an easy-to-spot cue to make judgments on less readily accessible attributes, such as experience and credence attributes (Berkowitz, 1987). Whereas search attributes (e.g., a car’s engine power) can be verified relatively easily at purchase, experience attributes (e.g., a car’s reliability) can only be verified after product usage. Credence attributes (e.g., a car’s safety) are difficult to verify even after an extensive period of usage (Nelson, 1970). Because people often purchase products before using these products beforehand (Thompson & Hamilton, 2006), they need to turn to alternative indicators, such as the brand, price, the sales person’s advice, or the product appearance for their evaluations of such experience and credence attributes in a purchase situation (Dawar & Parker, 1994; Kirmani & Wright, 1989). Even though product appearance is only one of various cues that people can use, it plays an important role in evaluating difficult to verify functional attributes. Generally, product appearance is one of the first things that a person inspects when he or she encounters a new product. Based on the product appearance, a person develops a first impression of the product. This impression is of great importance because it can bias the processing of other information. In light of this, it has been concluded that product appearance can directly prompt important inferences about the product’s functional attributes resulting in form-function interdependency (Bloch, 1995; Creusen & Schoormans, 2005; Crilly et al., 2004; Jordan, 2000; Page & Herr, 2002). For example, an aesthetically attractive laptop may be judged to have greater performance quality than an aesthetically unattractive laptop with similar specifications (Page & Herr, 2002). Furthermore, people may use the shape and color of packages for their taste expectations (Berkowitz, 1987; Smets & Overbeeke, 1995). For designers, it is important to have a thorough understanding of this form-function interdependency in order to successfully design products that prompt the desired inferences. The central objective of this article is to explore whether product personality (i.e., the set of human personality traits that are used to describe a product variant (Govers & Schoormans, 2005) can also explain the inferences about functional attributes that people draw from the appearance. Thus far, scholars have