Voice recorder-MP3 players, crossover and hybrid, duel-fuel vehicles, and many other hybrids products are growing exponentially. Marketers hope when two product categories blend together that consumers think it's great. But often they don't. New research by Marketing Professor Priyali Rajagopal of SMU Cox and Robert Burnkrant shows how hybrid products have a unique set of marketing challenges.

Rajagopal says, "When we categorize an object, we make beliefs that are consistent with its characteristics. Consider water, for example. A bottle of water elicits beliefs such as: 'It's healthy to drink, refreshing, pure, etc.'" Early on, consumers viewed the cell phone with PDA attributes as primarily a cell phone. Or take the GPS-radar gadget. Well, it's mainly a GPS gizmo, with a few radar attributes. "This is a huge problem for marketers because it costs money to add features. Consumers categorize in one area or another, and then draw inferences which flow from that single category, not multiple categories."


Making One into Two

So how can communications be arranged to make people aware of the two categories? One answer comes from "priming," a term from psycholinguistics. In the study, when people were exposed to informational materials about both product categories, they were able to properly acknowledge the two parts of a hybrid product. Respondents were shown examples of hybrid products in ads like a pen-pencil, a cell-PDA, and so on. "Being exposed to numerous examples helped them see that the product belonged to both categories," Rajagopal explained. "It was a really simple, intuitive finding. Being primed with many examples has an impact on information processing and thus beliefs. This then affects how consumers see the product in the future." The authors found that when you didn't prime people, they refused to acknowledge that the product belonged in two categories.

Are advertisers doing what they are supposed to be doing to communicate effectively about their hybrid product? 'Not really' Rajagopal says. In the case of crossovers vehicles and iPhones, for example, people are accustomed to many of the categories. iPhones belong to the smartphone category. When Rajagopal first became interested in hybrid products eight years ago, the cell-PDA was novel. But marketers created the category as a smartphone. With crossovers, a relatively new category, the features of the car, like fuel economy, combines with the driving performance of an SUV, a different product category. She mentions that manufacturers didn't really promote crossovers; it was the business press and dealers. Consumers also receive a lot of help at dealerships to explain features to a buyer.

With electronics products, priming may be harder. Will you be properly primed or informed when you walk into a Best Buy and see the voice recorder-MP3 player. One of the biggest problems manufacturers may face is that the extra product, the MP3 player function, may not be used. But if you expose people to different primes they respond differently. Take for example, the words "book-magazine." Is this a magazine about books or a thick, book-like magazine?  The terminology used (interpretation strategy) or combinations thereof have different implications, and people derive different takeaways depending on how information is presented, Rajagopal notes.


Implications

From an advertising perspective,  firms needs to communicate more effectively about these products, that they are in fact hybrids. "In the absence of clear communications, consumers are not going to take away that feature," says Rajagopal. "The product will be viewed as uni-dimensional otherwise. The extra feature will come across unnoticed and unused (like the MP3 feature of the slick voice recorder). Thus the money spent for the MP3 is wasted."

From a product design standpoint, "firms need to ensure that both features have adequate design quality," Rajagopal states. "If one part is shoddy, and the other feature is good, the shoddy feature is overlooked or downgraded. You need to have acceptable thresholds for both categories."

One of the hardest tasks, even in social psychology, is how to get people to view an object from two different perspectives simultaneously, says Rajagopal. "It's hard to do. Most people normally use one lense to view something." And, Rajagopal adds, "once something is labeled, it's hard to overcome."  With technologies' ability to create many more hybrid products in the future, firms and those charged with marketing them must set the stage well.


"Consumer Evalutions of Hybrid Products" by Priyali Rajagopal and Robert Burnkrant is forthcoming in Journal of Consumer Research.


Written by Jennifer Warren.