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It’s a complex world, so who can blame consumers for wanting to buy products that will make their lives less complicated and cluttered?

According to the latest , which surveyed more than 15,000 people in nine countries, 64% of consumers are willing to pay more for simpler brand experiences. In 2023, Whole Foods ranked at the top of the list, followed by the U.S. Postal Service, Lyft, UPS and Burger King.

Philip Fernbach

Consumers especially prioritize simplicity in product companies, perceiving their products as transparent, easy to understand and low risk.

“Things are being marketed as simple or giving the impression of simplicity. And we sort of associate this feeling of simplicity with something being low risk, which is not always the case,” said Philip Fernbach, marketing professor in the Leeds School of Business. “Companies may be overpromising by promoting themselves as simple in ways that lead to dissatisfaction down the line.”

Fernbach co-authored a recent on the topic with , a Leeds PhD graduate (PhDMktg'21) and now assistant professor of marketing at the University of Oregon’s Lundquist College of Business. 

The study, published in April 2024 in the American Marketing Association, incorporated six experiments and analysis of proprietary customer satisfaction data from Consumer Reports for grills, mowers, blenders and vacuums. The researchers found that when consumers think brands are simple, they judge them to be less likely to experience product or service failures.

Fernbach said Light’s previous work as a marketing manager at Casper, a direct-to-consumer mattress company, inspired the research. 

“Casper’s whole thing is, ‘We’re simple. We have one product line. We have these beautiful ads that are very sparse. Everything's shipped right to your door.’ It's very different from the traditional way of buying a mattress, where you go in and there's tons of options,” Fernbach said. “That led people to have the expectation that everything was going to go smoothly. And (in public relations) he dealt with a lot of people who had problems with their orders and were very upset and angry.”

There is a psychological component to how consumers perceive such products. According to the researchers, consumers judge the complexity of brands based on the complexity of their mental representations of those brands. This can be affected by how clean and straightforward the art, details and presentation are in a product’s advertisements, for example. The opposite is also true.

The researchers found that when products fail to deliver, consumers tend to punish simpler brands and are less likely to recommend them over brands with more complex marketing.

“We associate complex things with higher risk — they have more parts and more things that can go wrong,” Fernbach said. “So Casper comes along and says we've got one product with nothing else going on — just the mattress shipped to your door. Your mental representation of Casper is going to be very sparse. And simple seems good. You're not going to be thinking about the people in customer service, you're not going to be thinking about the various materials, the production processes, all these things.”

In other words, this perceived simplicity can cloud your judgment as a consumer. 

“Something may be promoted as simple but there is actually complexity to the process or the product,” Fernbach said. “If there's hidden complexity that you're not aware of, and then you run into problems, there's a good chance you're going to be dissatisfied later because things are going to occur that you didn't anticipate.”

The big takeaway for consumers: Look beyond the marketing messages and do your research. Simple products make shopping easy, but they’re not necessarily the best choices.