When to focus on the detail and when on the big picture: psychological distance of utilitarian vs luxury products and services

How customers experience a product or a service is a much debated topic. This study applies the Construal Level Theory (Trope & Liberman, 2010), a social cognitive theory, to explain how consumer perceive utilitarian vs. luxury products and services. The assumption investigated is that luxury products are psychologically the most distant and abstract, followed by luxury experiences, utilitarian products and utilitarian experiences. This is tested with digitalised book data from Google. The retrieved words are replaced with concreteness scores from Brysbaert et al. (2014) and analysed in a repeated two-way factorial. Results show that products are generally psychologically closer and concreter than experiences and the link between psychological distance and utilitarian vs. luxury goods is not as strong as assumed. The results are discussed in light of data type, analytical techniques, and consumption phases.