Tüketicilerin alışılageldik olmayan ürün demetlerini değerlendirmesi üzerine iki inceleme

Although the marketplace has long been dominated by product bundles that consist of functionally complementary items which serve a single consumption goal, marketers have recently started to develop bundles that involve consumer products which are noncomplementary and which serve distinct consumption goals. However, research comparing the profitability and favorability of such bundles is scarce. This dissertation aims at providing initial insights into consumers' evaluation process of two types of unconventional product bundles; namely, non-complementary product bundles and vice-virtue bundles. In essay 1, I examine when and why consumers prefer bundles with non-complementary products (e.g., toothpaste and hairbrush) over bundles with functionally complementary items (e.g., toothpaste and toothbrush). I show that the process of evaluating complementary versus non-complementary item product bundles has distinct cognitive consequences. More specifically, I show that evaluating a non-complementary item product bundle results in higher mental abstraction than evaluating a product bundle involving complementary items. Consequently, I further document that consumers prefer non-complementary item bundles over complementary item bundles when they are initially made to think more abstractly or when the decision context involves higher temporal or spatial distance. In essay 2, I examine bundles that involve vice and virtue products. The main characteristic of vice—virtue bundles is that the two products in the bundle serve different (and often conflicting) goals such as a health goal and a taste goal. These types of bundles have started to become more common in the marketplace since consumers want to indulge themselves without feeling guilty and the virtue component in the bundle relieves the sense of guilt. Despite increasing popularity of vice—virtue bundles, little is known about factors that enhance or hurt consumers' evaluation of such bundles. As an initial investigation of the factors that influence vice—virtue bundle evaluation, I examine in essay 2 the impact of vice magnitude on consumers' evaluation and willingness to pay for the bundle. I show that, when the payoffs associated with bundle components are non-comparable, increasing vice magnitude decreases consumers' valuation of the bundle. However, when what consumers gain by choosing the virtue and what they lose by choosing the vice are comparable, increasing the magnitude of the vice component decreases bundle valuation. I document that these effects occur since consumers engage in distinct justification processes under high versus low payoff comparability. In a nutshell, this dissertation provides novel insights into how consumers evaluate the two ever-growing types of product bundles. The two studies included in this dissertation enrich our understanding of the psychological underpinnings of bundle evaluation and offer substantive implications for contexts in which consumers make judgments by simultaneously considering multiple pieces of information. Moreover, these studies extend and enrich construal level and moral justification theories.