Made With Love: Examining Consumer Engagement With Handmade Versus Machine-Made Production Cues

Abstract

Advancing technologies have led to structural change in production methods, influencing not only business practices but also significantly reshaping consumer mindsets. Businesses increasingly utilise production cues, such as ‘handmade’, to differentiate their products and foster consumer engagement. While prior studies demonstrate that production cues can affect consumer responses, it remains unclear how the impact of these cues (e.g., handmade vs. machine-made) differs between consumer segments. Marketers remain uncertain about how to strategically leverage these effects across consumer profiles and product portfolios. Addressing this gap, this research applies regulatory mode theory, providing a nuanced understanding of production cues' impact on consumer engagement, with a focus on locomotion regulatory mode. Study 1, an online survey experiment, presents a moderated mediation analysis: while the effect of production cues on willingness to pay is mediated through love, this impact significantly varies with consumers' locomotion regulatory mode (low vs. high). Study 2 extends these findings through an automated text analysis of social media data (n = 9380), validating the moderating role of locomotion in a real-world context by analysing the marketer-generated content of Facebook posts. The findings of both studies confirm our predictions that production cues elicit distinct engagement responses depending on consumer segments: high-locomotion consumers, who value efficiency, show diminished engagement with production cues. This research advances the theory of production cue effects by offering novel insights and provides marketers with actionable implications for segmentation and targeted communication.