Harmful Effects of Mental Imagery and Customer Orientation During New Product Screening

Abstract

One of the traditional tenets of marketing is that managers considering whether to develop and launch a new product should adopt a customer orientation and consider whether the product would satisfy the needs of customers. This research discovers that adopting a customer orientation causes managers to experience undesirable cognitive effects. The authors find that when considering customers’ needs during the screening phase of the new product development process, managers often voluntarily engage in mental imagery (i.e., cognitive simulation) that biases their evaluation of a new product idea toward unrealistic optimism—even for a flawed product that would not satisfy customer needs. Furthermore, the authors find that managers who exert greater vigilance to achieve more accurate evaluations of the new product idea are especially vulnerable to the biasing effect, leading to less accurate evaluations. The authors test an analytical technique (i.e., a theory-based approach to analyzing the new product) that successfully allows a manager to adopt a customer orientation without an attendant bias toward optimism.