Gut Liking for the Ordinary: Incorporating Design Fluency Improves Automobile Sales Forecasts
Landwehr, Labroo and Herrmann tested whether adding objective measures of design prototypicality and complexity improves automobile sales forecasts. They photographed the frontal designs of 28 popular car models, morphed the images, and scored each car by its distance from the morphed average and by compressed file size. Adding the design measures improved forecast accuracy by up to 19 per cent. Prototypical but complex designs felt fluent, and the fluency produced positive gut reactions that became attached to the car. The effect held for economy and premium cars and persisted after controlling for traditional predictors. Journal of record: Marketing Science 30(3), 416-429, 2011.
Landwehr, Labroo and Herrmann tested whether adding objective measures of design prototypicality and complexity improves automobile sales forecasts. They photographed the frontal designs of 28 popular car models, morphed the images, and scored each car by its distance from the morphed average and by compressed file size. Adding the design measures improved forecast accuracy by up to 19 per cent. Prototypical but complex designs felt fluent, and the fluency produced positive gut reactions that became attached to the car. The effect held for economy and premium cars and persisted after controlling for traditional predictors. Journal of record: Marketing Science 30(3), 416-429, 2011.
Written from the abstract, OpenAlex record, 2026-11-03; citation details from Crossref, 2026-11-03.
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Landwehr, J. R., Labroo, A. A., & Herrmann, A. (2011). Gut Liking for the Ordinary: Incorporating Design Fluency Improves Automobile Sales Forecasts. Marketing Science, 30(3), 416-429. doi:10.1287/mksc.1110.0633 https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.1110.0633