Companies increasing strive to develop better products to meet consumer demands and increase customer involvement. One of the newest methods have been incorporating user-design into their product development methods. User-design directly involves the consumer by allowing consumers to submit their own ideas for new products in which the company can then produce. Using Mandler’s schema incongruity theory we combine product type and ad claim combination to form congruent utilitarian (hedonic)/function (aesthetic) and moderately incongruent utilitarian (hedonic)/aesthetic (function) combinations.
The results show that congruent combinations create a more favorable brand attitude than moderately incongruent combinations. There was no moderating effects of perceived performance risk or need for cognition. The high level of perceived risk likely disrupted the benefits of moderate incongruity causing a preference for the norm. The use of moderate incongruity is extremely risky for user-designed products.

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