The Effect of Adding Features on Product Attractiveness: the Role of Product Perceived Congruity

This paper investigates the effect of adding more features on product evaluation. We argue that product evaluation as the number of features increases depends on the congruity of the features added with the product. We show that adding features leads to increased product attractiveness if these features are congruent with the product, but not if these features are moderately or extremely incongruent. However, the manipulation of two factors, task involvement and temporal construal, has been shown to make product evaluation increase as more moderately (but not extremely) incongruent features are added to the product.