Why Do Appetizers Matter More When You’re Dining Out with Friends?

First impressions of experiences have a greater impact when consumers share the experience with others, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.
“When consumers consume an experience alone, the end of the experience has a greater effect on their overall evaluations. On the other hand, when consumers consume an experience with others, the beginning has a greater influence on how they judge the entire experience,” write authors Rajesh Bhargave (University of Texas, San Antonio) and Nicole Votolato Montgomery (University of Virginia).
Experiences (vacations, concerts, meals) often have multiple components that can be judged separately. For example, a consumer visiting a museum might like some paintings but dislike others, or a diner at a restaurant might love the appetizers and main course but hate dessert. How consumers judge experiences may depend on whether they are shared with others or consumed alone.
In one study, consumers viewed a series of paintings while either seated alone or with companions. One group was shown a series of paintings beginning with the “least enjoyable” painting and ending with the “most enjoyable,” while another group was shown the same paintings in the reverse order. Consumers who were seated alone preferred the series of paintings with the “most enjoyable” painting presented last, while those who viewed the paintings with companions preferred the series with the “most enjoyable” painting presented first.
The order of events in an experience can greatly influence overall enjoyment. Tour operators, museum curators, event planners, spa and resort managers, and others charged with creating consumption experiences should consider whether consumers tend to engage in the experience alone or with others.
“While consumers sometimes engage in experiences alone, they often share them with others and their overall evaluations are shaped by the social context in which they occur. Companies should consider the social context of a consumption experience, because consumers think differently and form different memories and evaluations when they feel bonded to others,” the authors conclude. 

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Why Do Appetizers Matter More When You’re Dining Out with Friends?

Why Is It Easier to Lose 2-4 Pounds Rather Than 3 Pounds?

Consumers are more likely to pursue goals when they are ambitious yet flexible, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.
“Whether a goal is a high-low range goal (lose 2 to 4 pounds this week) or a single number goal (lose 3 pounds this week) has a systematic effect on goal reengagement. High-low range goals influence consumer goal reengagement through feelings of accomplishment, which itself is driven by the attainability and challenge of the goal,” write authors Maura L. Scott (Florida State University) and Stephen M. Nowlis (Washington University in St. Louis).
Consumers often have a choice about the types of goals they want to set for themselves, and they may want to repeat various goals over time. For example, consumers often reengage goals such as losing weight, saving money, or improving their exercise or sports performance.
In one study, consumers in a weight loss program set either high-low range goals or single number goals. At the end of the program, consumers with high-low range goals reenrolled in the program at higher rates even though there was no difference in actual average weight loss across the two groups. In other studies, consumers exhibited similar behaviors with other goals such as resisting tempting foods, solving puzzles, or playing a grocery shopping game.
A high-low range goal can offer “the best of both worlds” compared to a single number goal due to its flexibility: the high end of the goal (lose 4 pounds) increases the challenge of the goal, while the low end (lose 2 pounds) increases its attainability. On the other hand, a single number goal (lose 3 pounds) may be perceived as a compromise and therefore both less challenging and less attainable.
“Consumers are more likely to pursue a goal when they set a high-low range goal instead of a single number goal. Consumers experience a greater sense of accomplishment when a goal is both attainable and challenging, and this makes them want to continue to pursue or reengage their goal,” the authors conclude. 

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Why Is It Easier to Lose 2-4 Pounds Rather Than 3 Pounds?

Consumer Choice and Product Organization

Consumers choose lower-priced products and are more satisfied with their purchase when products are organized by benefits instead of features, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

“It matters whether products are organized by features or benefits. Simply changing the way the same set of products is organized impacts how consumers process information and make choices,” write authors Cait Poynor Lamberton (University of Pittsburgh) and Kristin Diehl (University of Southern California).
Consumers frequently shop for products that have been organized by both features and benefits. For example, Crest organizes toothpaste by features (pastes, gels, stripes) or benefits (whitening, flavor, sensitivity).
In one study, consumers were asked to choose from an assortment of nutrition bars organized either by benefits (muscle-building, fat-burning) or features (fruit bars, nut bars). Consumers perceived the products to be more similar (offering less variety) and therefore interchangeable when they were organized by benefits instead of features. The perception that products organized by benefits are less distinctive led consumers to focus on price and choose cheaper items.
Consumers should be aware that items organized by benefits might seem to be more similar than they actually are. By focusing solely on price, consumers may end up sacrificing quality to save money when they shouldn’t. On the other hand, consumers should also be aware that they are more likely to notice differences when products are organized by features. This can prevent them from paying more for an item when the difference doesn’t really matter.
“Companies have an almost infinite number of options in setting up their product assortments, especially online. Organizing options makes decision making easier, but the decision about how to organize also matters. As a form of choice architecture, assortment organization shouldn’t be overlooked – it can make a big difference for both consumers and companies,” the authors conclude. 

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Consumer Choice and Product Organization

How to stay ahead of consumer behavior

Great article by Accenture. Download it by clicking here.o

How to stay ahead of consumer behavior

Popular social media site Twitter may eventually resemble a broadcast medium like television or radio, with users reading messages written by celebrities and corporations rather than writing their own “tweet” messages of up to 140 characters, suggests a new study coauthored by Andrew T. Stephen, assistant professor of business administration and Katz Fellow in Marketing in the University of Pittsburgh’s Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business and College of Business Administration.

In one of the first studies to use social media as a laboratory for social science experiments, Stephen and coauthor Olivier Toubia, the Glaubinger Professor of Business at Columbia University, questioned what motivates people to post tweets. Are Twitter users motivated by broadcasting their thoughts and opinions or, rather, by their desire to increase their social status by accumulating followers?

The results, published in the May/June issue of the peer-reviewed journalMarketing Science, provide insights into that question and have generated a surprising prediction of what the social network may operate like in the future.

To investigate the question, Stephen and Toubia identified approximately 2,500 Twitter users who were being followed by a range of other Twitter users, numbering from 13 to more than 10,000. All were noncorporate, noncelebrity users, and they were not tweeting for commercial purposes. Half the users were put into a control group, and the authors recorded daily data on the participants’ number of followers and their tweeting activity over a period of two months.

Stephen and Toubia then hired undergraduate research assistants to create 100 Twitter accounts. Following Twitter’s terms of service, the assistants added realistic-looking names and locations for these accounts, and they had the accounts follow one other as well as popular users like Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber. The assistants even sent out simple tweets—“It’s a pretty day today” or “The sky is blue”—to further support the illusion that the accounts were operated by real people.

Over the ensuing two months, the assistants used the new accounts to follow the users in the test group, gradually increasing each user’s list of followers by 100. The authors monitored these accounts to see how the increase in audience size affected the users’ tweeting activity.

Users who had few followers initially showed no change in their tweeting habits. Similarly, “high-end” users—those with as many as 10,000 followers—did not exhibit much change, likely because 100 additional followers was “a drop in the bucket,” Stephen said.

Among “mid-range” users, however, the authors noted significant changes in tweeting activity. “Users with 13 to 26 followers did increase activity,” said Stephen, speculating that these users were encouraged by the increase in followers to post more to a suddenly larger audience.

But users with slightly more followers—from 62 to 245—showed the opposite instinct, posting less as their followers increased. These users had already achieved some level of status, Stephen said, and wanted to preserve it by avoiding posting anything that would offend their followers. “As they get more followers,” he said, “they want to be careful about what they post.” These results indicated to the researchers that many users were more interested in gaining followers than in using Twitter to broadcast their views.

The trend of users posting less as they accumulated more followers led the authors to one of the more striking findings in the paper.

There is a natural tendency, Stephen explained, for active users to gain followers over time. Add to that the authors’ finding that users will post less as they gain followers, and it’s natural to conclude, Stephen said, that Twitter users are going to post less.

But commercial users, celebrities, and institutions like schools and sports teams, Stephen said, will continue to post information to the people who want it. “So what it becomes is another advertising channel, a broadcast medium, as opposed to a socially interactive one,” Stephen said.

Such a change is prevented, for now, by the influx of new users to the social media service. If Twitter should reach a point when no new users are signing up, the shift away from an interactive platform toward a one-way conduit for information would become more likely.

In such a scenario, Twitter would remain a viable channel for corporations, celebrities, and other high-end users to communicate with their fans, Stephen said. They might utilize their Twitter feeds the same way they use mailing lists to announce products and promotions to their followers.

“Longer term,” Stephen said, “to get value, they’ll need the people who start following them to react to these tweets and to retweet them.” But as his and Toubia’s model suggests, over time, regular users will be less likely to do so. Marketers using Twitter will be challenged to offer rewards and other incentives to engage users and counteract the tendency to tweet less, keeping the social network truly interactive.

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Advertising Product Results? Put Images Closer Together

Consumers believe a product is more effective when images of the product and its desired outcome are placed closer together in advertisements, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.
“Merely changing the spatial proximity between the image of a product and its desired effect in an advertisement influences judgment of product effectiveness. Consumers tend to judge the product to be more effective when the two images are closer versus farther apart,” write authors Boyoun (Grace) Chae (University of British Columbia), Xiuping Li (National University of Singapore), and Rui (Juliet) Zhu (University of British Columbia).
Many advertisements promoting the effectiveness of a product show both a product image (anti-wrinkle cream) and an image of the promised results (a face without wrinkles). Objectively, the distance between the two images should not affect how consumers judge the product’s quality.
In a series of studies, consumers were asked to judge the effectiveness of a variety of products promising specific results (acne cream, pain reliever, nasal allergy spray, bug spray, fabric softener). Consumers tended to assume a product was more effective when its image was placed closer to that of its promised effect. The proximity of the images was more influential when consumers were less knowledgeable about a product category or when the results were expected sooner rather than later.
Companies should understand the subtle effect that spatial proximity between images has on consumer judgment of product effectiveness. When companies want to promote the immediate effects of their products, images of the product and its desired effect should be put closer to each other in an advertisement.
“The spatial proximity between visual representations of cause and effect in an advertisement can influence consumer judgments of product effectiveness. The closer the distance between an image of a product (an acne treatment) and that of its potential effect (a smooth face), the more effective consumers will judge the product to be,” the authors conclude. 

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Advertising Product Results? Put Images Closer Together

Why we love it or hate it: The 3 E's

Why do brands such as Manchester United and Apple capture hearts and minds? When consumers feel a strong emotional attachment to a brand, there is seemingly nothing we would not do–from paying more for it to defending it against detractors. For all the millions of dollars spent on advertising and other efforts, however, consumers rarely feel an affinity for brands. So how do marketers make consumers develop a strong attachment for a product or service? According to a recent study from USC Marshall School of Business, it is achieved by appealing to people's aesthetic needs (enticing/annoying to the self), functional needs (enabling/disabling for the self) and spiritual needs (whether something is enriching/impoverishing). In short, brands to which we are loyal, evoke warm feelings and provide pleasure, speak to who we are and help manage the problems we have in daily life.
"Attachment-aversion (AA) model of customer-brand relationships," published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology and co-authored by USC Marshall's C. Whan Park, Joseph A. DeBell Chair in Business Administration and professor of marketing; Andreas B. Eisingerich, associate professor of marketing, Imperial College (London) Business School; and Jason Whan Park, Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh, identifies three factors that must be in place in order to build strong emotional attachment to brands and, conversely, limit aversion to a product or service. Marketers who want to build emotional affinity for their brands need to appeal to consumers on three fronts: strong aesthetics or self-enticing properties such as the taste of deep chocolate or the sleek design of a European car, have self-enabling benefits or the ability to solve customer problems (such as Swiss Army Knife, which allows one to feel power over one's environment) and self-enriching benefits or those that resonate with customers' beliefs or values and support their self-identities (activated for example, by location brands such as one's hometown, a membership to nonprofit or a luxury brand such as Rolex that is aspirational). These factors, the three E's—enticement, enablement and enrichment—are critical for all brands and their interplay determines our distance to the brand: whether we are more attached or have an aversion.
"There are many cases these days where people are very adverse to certain brands. This is a serious issue," said Park. "Why people become so antagonistic toward a brand is based on these three reasons, when it displeases them aesthetically or doesn't help them solve their daily problems or is contrary to their personal beliefs."
To test their attachment-aversion model, the researchers carefully developed the four-item scale of the attachment-aversion measure and conducted three studies, assessing consumer purchasing behavior over time, based on carefully chosen products: Apple, a product brand that draws strong consumer loyalty from their compelling design and emphasis on creativity; Manchester United, a soccer franchise that tends to generate extreme reactions in Great Britain (both positive and negative); and a grocery store chain in Austria. The scholars measured attachment and aversion by looking at attitudes and actions: what consumers would do for these brands, including defending them against criticism, participating in an affiliated charity event and feeling happy (sad) when good (bad) things happened to a brand. The researchers found that their model was better able to predict consumer reactions through not only their stated future intentions, but actual purchasing behavior during the final study.
Whether a brand was self-enriching was the stronger predictor of whether there would be a small distance/attachment or a larger distance/aversion to a brand. The researchers cite the strength of Nike's "Just Do It" as an example. In addition, the researchers also found that the older consumers were more motivated by self-enriching qualities of brands versus self-enticing benefits (aesthetic appeal), while the opposite was true for younger consumers.
The study also distinguished two other attitudes towards brands that marketers need to address quite differently: the mixed (both positive and negative) perceptions of a brand and indifference. Brand managers need to focus on reducing the distance between customers and a brand, by examining how much value customers perceive from the current offering of a brand with respect to those three E's.
"Great brands simultaneously offer sensory pleasure and self-pride. Sensory pleasure comes from the self-enticing product cues (e.g., product design, package design, color, brand logo, etc.). Self-pride comes from two different sources: self-enabling benefits of a product and self-enriching message of a brand," said Park.
Self-enabling benefits provide a boost of self-efficacy and self-confidence. "That's when you feel proud of yourself—when you can deal with daily problems without difficulty and feel secure," said Park. "Self-enriching messages of a brand makes you feel good about yourself because you relate yourself to its moral values and philosophies."
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Why we love it or hate it: The 3 E's