Effects of Usage and Name on Perceptions of New Products

Longitudinal changes in perceptions of both new and existing brands in the same product class are studied. Specifically pairwise similarity judgments are collected before and after participation in a 6-occasion choice and usage experiment. Comparisons are made across both the original similarity jugments and the resulting group-level perceptual spaces. Changes are a function of type of brand (old or new) and experimental manipulations. Substantively, the results support the previously untested configural invariance hypothesis, i.e., the perceptions of existing brands are not substantially changed by the introduction of new brands that are relatively different. This suggests this type of scaling technique can be used to predict consumer reactions to new product introductions—even if they are fairly different from current offerings.