Feature Fatigue: When Product Capabilities Become Too Much of a Good Thing
Published 11/1/2005
Author: Debora Viana Thompson, Rebecca W. Hamilton, and Roland T. Rust
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Executive Summary
As technology advances, it becomes more feasible to load products with a large number of features, each of which might be considered useful. Although both economic theory and current market research techniques suggest that increasing the number of features makes a product more appealing, too many features can make a product overwhelming and difficult to use. In this article, Thompson, Hamilton, and Rust investigate how consumers balance their competing needs for product functionality and ease of use when evaluating products.
In three studies, the authors show that consumers understand that there are both usability costs and capability benefits when features are added to products. However, because consumers give more weight to capability and less weight to usability when they evaluate products before use than when they evaluate products after use, consumers tend to choose overly complex products that do not maximize their satisfaction, which results in “feature fatigue.”
Thompson, Hamilton, and Rust use the results of their studies to build a simple analytical model that provides additional insights into the feature fatigue effect. Several important managerial implications emerge. First, from the perspective of customer lifetime value, choosing the number of features that maximizes initial choice of the product results in including too many features. Second, if the number of features is sufficiently large, additional features should not be added, even if they may be added at no cost. Third, as the emphasis on future sales increases, the optimal number of features decreases. Fourth, the results suggest that firms should consider having a larger number of more specialized products, each with a limited number of features, rather than loading all possible features into one product.
Biography
Debora Viana Thompson is a doctoral candidate in the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. Her research interests are the effects of consumers’ information-processing strategies on product evaluation and choice. Her dissertation proposal investigates how consumers trade off product capability and usability in their product evaluations, and she was a winner in the 2005 Marketing Science Institute’s Alden G. Clayton Doctoral Dissertation Proposal Competition.
Rebecca W. Hamilton is Assistant Professor of Marketing in the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. Her research focuses on social aspects of consumer decision making, such as the strategies consumers use to influence others’ choices, the manner in which consumers’ relationships with others affect their choices, and the effects of perceived norms on decision making. A second stream of research examines the effects of consumers’ information-processing strategies on their attitudes and choices. Her research has been published in Journal of Consumer Research. Professor Hamilton was selected as an AMA Sheth Doctoral Consortium Fellow in 1999, and her dissertation received an honorable mention in the Association for Consumer Research’s Ferber Award competition. She teaches consumer behavior to undergraduate, MBA and doctoral students. Before receiving her doctoral degree, Hamilton spent five years at Price Waterhouse LLP in Boston, where she served as a staff consultant, senior consultant, and principal consultant.
Roland T. Rust is David Bruce Smith Chair in Marketing in the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, where he is Chair of the Marketing Department and directs the Center for Excellence in Service. His lifetime achievement honors include the American Marketing Association’s Gilbert A. Churchill Award for Lifetime Achievement in Marketing Research, the Outstanding Contributions to Research in Advertising award from the American Academy of Advertising, the AMA’s Career Contributions to the Services Discipline Award, Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Distinguished Marketing Scholar Award from SMA, and the Henry Latané Distinguished Doctoral Alumnus Award from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has won best article awards for articles in Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing (three times), Journal of Advertising, and Journal of Retailing, as well as MSI’s Robert D. Buzzell Best Paper Award (twice). His book, Driving Customer Equity (written with Valarie Zeithaml and Katherine Lemon) won the 2002 Berry–AMA Book Prize for the best marketing book of the previous three years. His work has received extensive media coverage, including a Business Week cover story and an appearance on ABC World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. He is the founder and Chair of the AMA’s annual Frontiers in Services Conference and serves as founding Editor of Journal of Service Research. He is currently Editor-elect of the Journal of Marketing. Professor Rust also is Area Editor at Marketing Science and Production and Operations Management, and he serves on the editorial review boards of Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, and Journal of Interactive Marketing. He has consulted with many leading companies worldwide, including such companies as American Airlines, AT&T, Chase Manhattan Bank, Comcast, Dow Chemical, DuPont, FedEx, IBM, Nortel, Procter & Gamble, Sears, Unilever, and USAA.
J Marketing Research, Volume 42, Number 4, November 2005
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