Overcoming the negative role of nostalgia in consumer reactions to automated products

Automated products that take over tasks that consumers used to carry out themselves are becoming increasingly sophisticated, but consumers continue to resist such innovations. Drawing on the status quo bias as a theoretical framework, this article investigates the role of nostalgia in consumer reactions to product automation in a series of six experiments with almost 1,500 participants. The first four experiments converge on a consistent finding: a high (vs. low) degree of automation reduces consumers’ nostalgic feelings about past consumption episodes, which in turn decreases nostalgia-prone consumers’ product evaluations. Against this backdrop, we conduct two additional experiments to determine how firms’ communication tactics can overcome the negative role of nostalgia proneness in consumer reactions to automated products. We conclude that managers involved in the marketing of automated products should assess the level of nostalgia in their target groups, and align both their intended positioning for the automated product and the decision to automate critical tasks within the product design that may evoke nostalgic feelings in consumers. Furthermore, when consumers are nostalgia-prone, managers should craft their launch communication tactics such that the focus is diverted from the automated task itself.