A comparison of hedonic and utilitarian digital products based on consumer evaluation and technology frustration

Abstract

This study explores how hedonic mobile applications (apps) compare to utilitarian apps in consumer evaluation. We posit that achieving a set of passionate consumers is a pre-cursor to product success in markets, whereas technology frustration is a negative hindrance to the product success. Also, we argue that technology frustration may act as a negative complementing factor to consumer passion, and this effect is higher for hedonic products than utilitarian products. We contextualize our study to the android apps, and used a dataset that tracked 19,121 apps in the android market for three months and coded our variables from this dataset. We conducted empirical analysis and found support for our hypotheses. This study contributes to the information systems and marketing literature in providing a new dimension associated with consumer evaluation of digital products, and draws evaluative comparisons between hedonic and utilitarian digital products.