Processing Style, Mood, and Regulatory Focus in Taxonomic vs. Thematic Product Choices

In my marketing dissertation, I would like to use tried and tested manipulations from cognitive psychology to explore a new phenomenon that is becoming particularly relevant in the marketing field. At the outset, I would like to emphasize that the home discipline for this proposal is marketing (consumer behavior), and not cognitive psychology. I am aware that the conceptual framework as well as manipulations I use are actually well known and fairly established in psychology, and this coincidentally provides the very reason for considering them as potentially reliable (precisely because they are not novel) tools in a new context, namely consumer behavior. What is exciting about this approach in general and about the proposal topic in particular is that it leads to novel predictions in consumer behavior. That is, it leads to predictions that defy existing knowledge and theories, in this case about buying different types of product bundles. The research question is how processing styles (global vs. local) affect how we choose products that are either taxonomically similar or thematically similar, and what the role of potential mediators (similarity disposition), as well as moderators (mood, as well as regulatory focus) might be. Taxonomic similarity refers to whether items share common features (e.g. dog and cat are both furry quadrupeds, and are both “mammals”), whereas thematic similarity focuses on functional interactions between items in a given scenario (e.g. helmet and motorbike, which shares very few features, are thematically similar in the context of riding a motorcycle at speed). Thinking about taxonomic relations is associated to thinking about differences, while thinking about thematic relationship has a focus on commonalities. In turn a focus on differences or commonalities has been shown to relate to processing styles, with a local processing style increasing the focus on differences and a global processing style increasing the focus on commonalities (Forster, 2009). Counter-intuitively, taxonomic and thematic thinking can be induced by priming the different processes that underlie both thinking styles. However it is important to understand whether and how this priming is consequential for product choice and for marketing activities in general. This is surprising, because people’s preference for one type of thinking over another seems to be a personal trait, such that roughly fifty percent of people think inherently taxonomically (a.k.a. in a detailed fashion), and fifty percent think thematically (Estes et al., 2012). Notably, as this study will show, thinking style and similarity preference are directly consequential for product choice and consequent brand extensions and marketing activities. I focus on thematic vs. taxonomic thinking as the main factor since it has been demonstrated that thematic relations between products are becoming particularly important in current years, influencing how a product should be positioned on the market (Noseworthy et al., 2010) and how well a brand can extend into a new product line (Estes et al., 2012). Despite these articles in the context of hybrid products and brand extensions, there is not much known about how thematic and taxonomic similarity affects product choice (in particular, in view of potential moderating/mediating effects of similarity disposition, mood, and regulatory focus), which is why I am proposing this as a dissertation topic.