Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

The Handmade Effect: What's Love Got to Do with It?

The Handmade Effect: What's Love Got to Do with It? Despite the popularity and high quality of machine-made products, handmade products have not disappeared, even in product categories in which machinal production is common. The authors present the first systematic set of studies exploring whether and how stated production mode (handmade vs. machine-made) affects product attractiveness. Four studies provide evidence for the existence of a positive handmade effect on product attractiveness. This effect is, to an important extent, driven by perceptions that handmade products symbolically “contain love.” The authors validate this love account by controlling for alternative value drivers of handmade production (effort, product quality, uniqueness, authenticity, and pride). The handmade effect is moderated by two factors that affect the value of love. Specifically, consumers indicate stronger purchase intentions for handmade than machine-made products when buying gifts for their loved ones but not for more distant gift recipients, and they pay more for handmade gifts when purchased to convey love than simply to acquire the best-performing product. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of Marketing SAGE

The Handmade Effect: What's Love Got to Do with It?

Loading next page...
 
/lp/sage/the-handmade-effect-what-s-love-got-to-do-with-it-bTqlJuhYTp

References (38)

Publisher
SAGE
Copyright
© 2015 American Marketing Association
ISSN
0022-2429
eISSN
1547-7185
DOI
10.1509/jm.14.0018
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Despite the popularity and high quality of machine-made products, handmade products have not disappeared, even in product categories in which machinal production is common. The authors present the first systematic set of studies exploring whether and how stated production mode (handmade vs. machine-made) affects product attractiveness. Four studies provide evidence for the existence of a positive handmade effect on product attractiveness. This effect is, to an important extent, driven by perceptions that handmade products symbolically “contain love.” The authors validate this love account by controlling for alternative value drivers of handmade production (effort, product quality, uniqueness, authenticity, and pride). The handmade effect is moderated by two factors that affect the value of love. Specifically, consumers indicate stronger purchase intentions for handmade than machine-made products when buying gifts for their loved ones but not for more distant gift recipients, and they pay more for handmade gifts when purchased to convey love than simply to acquire the best-performing product.

Journal

Journal of MarketingSAGE

Published: Mar 1, 2015

There are no references for this article.