Consumers and marketers are increasingly focused on promoting greater product usage after purchase, which is beneficial to consumers and the environment if it reduces excessive purchases. Yet how do people subjectively evaluate the total usage of a product? In particular, when considering how happy they would be with the total usage of a product, do people weigh the expected duration and frequency of usage equally, when duration and frequency make the same objective contribution to total usage and cost-per-use? This research proposes and finds that duration tends to be valued more than frequency, and consumers are more sensitive to duration than to frequency of usage. We believe this asymmetry to be partly driven by people’s perceptions of the distribution of these two dimensions in terms of social norms and variation in behavior. Specifically, people perceive stronger social norms and lower variation in other consumers’ duration (vs. frequency) of usage. This leads to greater evaluability of duration than frequency, and hence consumers’ greater sensitivity to it. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of how consumers subjectively perceive utility from product usage and has significant managerial implications for how marketers can better promote high-usage products.

Research involving brands has increased substantially in recent decades. Yet, there is no extensive and free dataset of consumer responses to branding stimuli. The present research develops and validates such a dataset, which we call the Brand Recognition and Attitude Norms Database (BRAND). BRAND is the most comprehensive set of methodologically transparent, freely-available, research-relevant consumer responses to branding stimuli, with measures of familiarity (awareness), liking (attitudes), and memory (recognition) of more than 500 top brands and their logos, spanning 32 industries. BRAND includes 5,356 primary datapoints aggregated from 244,400 raw datapoints (i.e., individual familiarity, liking, and memory responses) collected from 2000 US-resident consumers in two years (i.e., 2020 and 2024). The data exhibit good reliability, face validity, external validity, robustness across samples and time, cross-validity, and discriminant validity. BRAND can be broadly useful for testing hypotheses involving responses to brands, and for selecting stimuli in any study involving brands or logos. Thus, BRAND can facilitate research not only in consumer behavior and psychology, but also in several related academic disciplines (e.g., economics, management, marketing).

In this paper, we retrieved consumer ratings of well-established design features (i.e., naturalness, elaborateness, and harmony – Henderson and Cote 1998) of the 500 most successful US-consumer brands, and tested whether these are predictive of logo attitude and memorability. Highly natural (e.g., Apple’s logo) and elaborate designs (e.g., Harley Davidson’s logo) increase logo attitude, whereas harmonious designs (e.g., McDonald’s logo) do not. Additionally, highly natural designs are also highly memorable, whereas elaborate and harmonious designs are only marginally so. Such effects are robust across both more and less familiar logos.