The Effect of a Business-like Personality on the Perceived Performance Quality of Products

Ruth Mugge

People use the appearance of products as a cue for evaluating functional attributes at purchase. This research provides an understanding of this form-function interdependency by investigating the effect of a business-like personality in product appearance on the perceived performance quality of the product. A business-like personality is associated with competence, professionalism, and trustworthiness. As a result of these associations, people infer from a product appearance with a business-like personality that the product has greater performance quality. Two studies using stimuli from five product categories support this hypothesis. These findings indicate that product personality is another cue that people use to evaluate a product’s functional attributes, along with the What is beautiful is good principle.