ABSTRACT
The fact that consumers appear to subscribe to, what may be called, a "more fun is equal to less functional" intuition, is a problem for marketers. By making a product more emotionally appealing, marketers may inadvertently signal that it does not perform as well. For example, by making their earphones more colorful and attractive, Sonya A. Grier may be turning away consumers interested in sound quality. Apple's products are famously hedonically pleasing. But notice how their advertisements, while subtly highlighting their products' hedonic features, also explicitly convey their functional features—such as the lightness of their laptops, or the memory capacity of their iPods. By doing so, Apple effectively negates the negative inferences about functionality that consumers could be drawing. Tom Sawyer capitalized on an important insight: being denied the opportunity to do something makes people all the more eager to do it. Or, conversely, when something feels like an obligation, it becomes less enjoyable.
