Keep It Simple? Consumer Perceptions of Brand Simplicity and Risk

Evoking simplicity in marketing communications has become popular among marketing practitioners, but little is known about its effects on consumers and firms. The current work focuses on consumers’ perceptions of the simplicity or complexity of brands and a previously overlooked consequence of those perceptions. Results from six experiments and analysis of a proprietary customer satisfaction dataset from Consumer Reports (N = 147,600) show that when consumers think brands are simple, they judge them to be less likely to experience product or service failures. Although these lower risk judgments could be positive for brands, they can also lead consumers to punish simpler brands more in the event of failures. Results also suggest that consumers’ simplicity/complexity perceptions reflect the dimensionality of their mental representations of brands, and the relationship between simplicity and lower risk is attenuated when additional brand dimensionality is framed in terms of redundancy. The findings cast doubt on the degree to which evoking simplicity is a uniformly positive marketing strategy and encourage practitioners to more thoughtfully consider simplicity's implications for consumer and firm welfare.