EXPRESS: The Influence of Shared Consumption on Product Efficacy Perceptions: The Detrimental Effect of Sharing with Strangers

Abstract

Opportunities for the shared consumption of publicly available products that once might have been considered personal-use only, such as hand sanitizers and shampoos, are proliferating in the consumer environment. This work explores shared product consumption in these under-researched, but now ubiquitous, contexts. We suggest and find, over a series of five studies and across a variety of product domains, that sharing a product with strangers (i.e., sharing-out) engenders a lower sense of identification with the product, which leads to lower perceived product efficacy. We further show that the dampening effect of sharing-out on efficacy perceptions is limited to consumers high in self-brand connection.