Highly innovative products may offer consumers greater benefits than incrementally new products, yet they have a higher failure rate. The current research addresses the challenge faced by new products that are extremely different from existing offerings by drawing on theory regarding the evaluation of schema incongruity. The authors posit that consumers' acceptance of extremely incongruent products will increase when firms use strategies that facilitate cognitive flexibility and thus the likelihood that consumers will be able to make sense of incongruent new products. The authors examine the influence of three manipulations of cognitive flexibility—positive affect, a future (vs. past) launch description, and a cognitive flexibility prime—on evaluations of new products. The results from four experiments show that these factors facilitate participants' ability to make sense of extremely incongruent new products and that incongruity resolution leads to more positive evaluations. The results also indicate that understanding the benefits provided by extremely new products, rather than affect arising from resolution, leads to higher evaluations of these products.
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