Handmade brands and product variety perception: The "handmade = small variety" belief

Handmade brand positioning has become increasingly popular in recent years and is often believed to elicit positive reactions from consumers. However, consumers may not always view handmade brands positively. This research explores consumers’ perceptions of handmade brands and reveals a potentially negative consequence of handmade brands. Through five preregistered studies and two supplementary studies reported in the Web Appendix, we demonstrate that consumers perceive handmade brands as offering a smaller product variety than non-handmade brands, a phenomenon we term the “handmade = small variety” belief. This belief occurs mainly because consumers perceive handmade brands as having a smaller business size than non-handmade brands. Additionally, we demonstrate that the “handmade = small variety” belief is weakened when the business size is very large and when the production complexity is high. We also show the downstream implication of this belief: consumers are less likely to choose a handmade brand over a non-handmade brand when they have a shopping goal of exploring a wide variety of products, compared to when they do not have such a goal.