I think it is interesting to think about the role of a product manager in balancing innovation with buyer resistance. It really puts product managers in a difficult position where it feels like they cannot make everyone happy, so I am glad this reading tries to address this difficult question. The strategy that Gourville concludes with is that we as product managers must accept the resistance and work around it. It means holding the innovative products to higher standards and to market to the right audience, perhaps the unendowed or strong believers (page 9).
Loss aversion is defined by Kahneman and Tversky as “losses having a far greater impact on people than similarly sized gains” (page 2). It plays a role in buyer resistance because people tend to perceive the losses of new products to a greater degree and thus are less likely to invest in a new product rather than a familiar product, which Gourville calls products already “a part of their endowment” (page 3). I think this is related to the psychology of the human mind, how we just gravitate towards things, behaviors, and people that feel familiar. The question is how can we as product managers help customers overcome this or use this knowledge to get customers to give innovative products a fair chance in a biased mind?
The concept of feature creep is the introduction of unnecessary new features such that it detracts from the value of the product. Again, I feel what Gourville discusses is related closely to the psychological nature of our minds. We feel more attachment to things we spend a lot of time on, aka the IKEA effect. And developers/company executives feel this way towards innovation. I think awareness is the first step in developing a strategy to minimize this and really challenge these feelings so that we can find stronger rationales for the success of a product.
