**5. Conclusion and research implications**

According to our findings, the role of design in categorizing new hybrid products raises both theoretical and managerial concerns. At a theoretical level, affordance theory (less used in marketing) complements categorization theory in clarifying how consumers evaluate unfamiliar hybrid products and reduce the perceived risk associated with high-tech devices. Thus, affordance highlights the role of design in helping consumers classify, evaluate and infer the uses of the Flip Phone, on both holistic and component levels. This result goes far beyond the theses advanced by [11, 24] explaining that new product's uses can be derived from some design components or properties. Indeed, our results show that individuals do not fit into a single paradigm of categorization of unfamiliar NHPs, but tinker singular ways of doing that combine holistic and decomposed approaches of design to cope with this problem and to contain the perceived risk associated with its acquisition and use. In addition, on one hand, we show that the holistic perception of the NHP's design allows users to establish its categorization, as well as its potential uses; on another hand, consumers are shown to extract cues from the constituent level of the NHP's design in order to assess the performance of the new product.

The articulation of affordance and categorization theories in the evaluation of NHPs also has implications for companies. Facilitating perceptions of the NHPs' uses helps reduce the complexity associated with that product by making it easier for consumers to interpret and categorize this kind of innovation. Several possibilities are available to companies to position and promote this type of hybrid products according to their prioritized objectives: A first strategy would consist of firms in anchoring the launched NHPs in the most profitable basic (or new) category. Such anchoring can mainly occur at the design stage, according to the similarity of the product as a whole or of some of its salient components, along with their ability to suggest the new product's uses. Another option for suggesting the host category of the new product would be to devise a communication strategy that increases the frequency of instantiation of the NHP in the target category to make it naturally associated with a category, even
