'Why' First Or 'What' First?

Marketing communications about new product launch refer to the conveyance of the information pertaining to product attribute expressions and persuasion attempts expended to influence consumer product adoption. A firm that is proficient in communicating the positioning of its new products and leveraging its affiliated brands may maximize its chances of achieving profitable product acceptance in the target market. Existing literature empirically supports the positive relationship between effective marketing communications and new product success. While these researches are mostly concerned about the information type of new product launch communication, that is, what kind of information could arouse the intention of purchasing, such as relational messages emphasizing the relationship between the new product and its parent brand, which helps transfer existing brand equity to the focal new product, and characteristic descriptions that depicts unique selling points of the new product, the information order effects on consumer choice decision remains unclear. In other words, how consumers are convinced by the product information in light of their attention priority (e.g., why is the product vs. what is the product) remains uncharted.This study classifies product information order into two strategies:product innovation reasons followed by product feature descriptions as why-type strategy; and product feature descriptions followed by product innovation reasons as what-type strategy. These two strategies may lead to different consumer attention in product launch. For example, the launch of Tivo adopted what-type strategy in its product message:"our product can help you skip the advertisement, playback the TV shows and remember your watching habits...let you control your life...." This information order result in consumers over-focusing on some product features but not on the innovative change the product could make, thereby providing a lower level of persuasion.This study attempts to explore information order effects in product launch in light of three questions:Is there an information order effect when launching a new product? If there is. which information order strategy should we choose? And does the extent of familiarity of publisher moderate this effect?New product launch efforts often are decisive in securing new product success. The authors explore a marketing communication strategy from the perspective of information order, since consumer process information varies from the order of message and lead to different attitude. In the high-tech context, compare to the communication message order of what-type, why-type order has a stronger influence on purchase intention. Whereas perceived innovativeness and entrepreneur credibility demonstrate positive moderating effects on communication performance. This paper enriches communication strategy in support of product launch and has managerial implications on designing communication strategy.