Utilitarian and Hedonic Products
Christine Squires
MKTG 310/ Consumer Behavior
Professor Kimberly Roberts
June 7th, 2015

Utilitarian and Hedonic Product
Consumers’ choices to buy a product are persuaded by utilitarian and hedonic considerations. In most cases, it is found that hedonic goods are purchased for luxury consumption for fun, pleasure and excitement. For example – designer cloths, ZR1 Corvette, luxury diamond earrings, 80” LCD TV for my husband’s man cave etc. While utilitarian goods are purchased for instrumental or functional use. Essentially these goods are purchased for full filling the basic needs. The examples of these are like my children’s computers for school, replacing broken lawn mower for a newer version, water heater (economical), tires for car, every day shoes for my two children etc. While buying the hedonic product, a consumer thinks from form the luxury point of view, while to buy the utilitarian product, he thinks from the necessity point of view that can full fill his basic needs without any additional features. Both utilitarian and hedonic consumption of the product is discretionary choice of the consumer and the difference between these two decisions is the matter of degree of perception.
We can take the example of a Chrysler Town and country Minivan . One consumer can buy it for talking in emergency time in their family members while the other consumer’s need to buy a mobile phone can be chatting with their friends through internet or to click the photographs via high pixel camera etc. If we visit this website - http://www.samsung.com/in/consumer/mobile-phone/mobile-phone/essential-phone/ we cans see that the company has the variety of the products in different categories. If we chose the mobile phone category, again there are different products for different segment consumers. We can choose any products from two different