You Should Try These Together: Combinatory Recommendations Signal Expertise and Improve Product Attitudes

Abstract

This work introduces a novel cue that consumption advisers, like stylists and interior designers, can use to signal expertise: combinatory recommendations. In a combinatory recommendation, a person offers an opinion about compatibility among multiple products intended for joint usage. Across nine studies conducted in the lab and field, the authors find that offering a combinatory recommendation signals greater expertise (Study 1a, Study 2a) and, specifically, greater depth of knowledge (Study 1b), compared with other types of recommendations involving the same number of products. This effect does not depend on the helpfulness of the adviser (Study 2b) but is qualified by features of the recommendation itself (Study 3a) as well as the type of combination recommended (Study 3b). Importantly, the authors find this effect to have important downstream consequences, as the increased perceptions of expertise that follow a combinatory recommendation improve consumers’ attitudes both toward products included in the recommendation and toward subsequent recommendations made by the adviser (Study 4, Study 5). The real-world persuasive value of combinatory recommendations is also tested in a field study (Study 6) that explores the effect of combinatory recommendations on click-through rates of Instagram advertisements.