QUESTIONS FOR
A consumer behaviour research pioneer discusses some of his most important findings.
You have found that people don’t always have well-defined preferences—and that we often ‘make up the rules’ for a decision on the spot. Describe how this works.
When people make choices, they don’t simply refer to a ‘master list’ of preferences in their memory, or some preexisting choice algorithm. They use a wide variety of approaches and rules-of-thumb — and my colleagues and I found that these are often developed on the spot. We came up with the ‘constructive process view’ of decision making, which states that individuals often build strategies opportunistically, changing their processing on the spot depending upon the information they encounter during the course of solving the decision problem.
At the time, we realized that, if people are making things up as they go along, and if — as many studies had shown — the information that is most salient or noticeable in an environment is what gets people’s attention, these are very significant findings for marketers. There are endless ways to embrace these insights, whether it means that you
make part of your message appear in larger print or that you ensure your brand is placed next to a well-known competitor, so people can make comparisons (assuming that those comparisons would be favourable to you). Making salience work for you varies depending on the environment, and how information is displayed in that environment. A general principle is to try to use the package, ads, information displays or other factors under your control to make processing that is favourable to your product easy to do.
Of course, in some cases, people do have well-articulated preferences. This usually occurs when they are familiar and experienced with the product involved, and a more traditional, rational choice theory may be applicable in these situations. But I have found that, even in such cases, contextual factors often intrude.
Talk a bit more about the importance of the decisionmaking context.
The notion is, if the context matters so much — and research indicates that it does — then when you are doing any kind of market research, you should start by studying the context. Then, you need to match the context that consumers will face — as best you can — to your product or service design. This is what we call ‘context matching’.
Let’s say you produce a gourmet coffee product, but there is nothing systematic about where it appears with respect to competing products. That is a lost opportunity. You need to look into the real-world environment of the brick-and-mortar store. You can’t ignore it. Furthermore, if people often make decisions on the spot, and if they will process whatever information is the easiest to grasp in that situation, then, as noted above, you need to make information that is favourable to your brand very easy to process.
For example, suppose you’ve cut the sodium in your soup by 10 per cent. You can say on the package that it’s 10 per cent lower in sodium, but you haven’t made it easier for people to find out what they really want to know — which is, how does your soup compare to its competitors? To address this, you might put an image of a table with a few bowls of soup on the package that shows how your brand compares to others. This way, you don’t have to worry about how close your product is placed to other brands in the store.
Talk a bit about how our identity is tied to the brands we consume.
Whether it’s the clothing you wear, the kind of car you drive or the music you listen to, all of these things send signals to other people about your identity. Brands become linked to our identity when they are able to help us achieve goals. For example, brands can be used to meet self-expression needs, publicly or privately; they can serve as tools for social integration or for connecting us to the past; and they
may act as symbols of personal accomplishment, provide self-esteem, allow one to differentiate oneself and express individuality, and help people through life transitions.
Some products, like paper towels, are used in a very utilitarian fashion: People only care about how they function. But, other products have meaning far beyond their utilitarian aspects. Smartphones, for instance, have meaning above and beyond the device itself: There is meaning attached to whether you use Apple or, say, Samsung products.
What is a ‘symbolic’ brand?
These are brands that are better able than others to communicate something about the person using them. For example, research shows that publicly consumed (vs. privately consumed) and luxury (vs. necessity) products are best at conveying symbolic meaning about an individual.
Meanwhile, brands that are very popular and used by many different types of people (e.g., a Honda Civic, one of the best-selling cars in North America) may not communicate specific associations about the person who uses it.
How do ‘reference groups’ influence our consumption?
A big part of our relationship with brands is based on who else uses those products. Your readers might remember those Apple advertisements from a few years back, featuring the characters ‘Mac’ and ‘PC’, and focusing on humorous stereotypes of what each user was like. Basically, if you use that product, the image of the prototypical user associated with that product is going to be associated with you; so, the question becomes, ‘Is this product’s image consistent with who I am?’
If the prototypical user for a brand matches the kind of person you think you are — or aspire to be — you are much more likely to connect to that brand. On the other hand, if the prototypical user does not indicate anything about who you are, you will avoid it.
In your early research, you found that consumers are systematically biased in their concept of time. Please explain.
Unlike robots, human decision makers face limitations in their capacity for processing information, have limited computational abilities and are subject to a wide array of biases. Our concept of time is one aspect of this, and it leads to two categories of time: objective time and subjective time.
Objective time is time that can be accurately measured with a calendar or a stopwatch. But subjective time is very different. We humans are notoriously poor at judging time. In our studies, we asked people, ‘If you had to wait one week for Product X, how long would that seem to you?’ Then we asked, ‘How long would three weeks seem? We found that in consumers’ minds, three weeks’ time is actually much less than three times what one week feels like. The implications of this are significant, because people are often willing to trade off receiving a benefit in the future, vs. getting something with a lesser benefit right now.
Tell us how the economic concept of ‘diminishing marginal returns’ relates to consumer behaviour.
If I give you a two pound weight to hold, and then add one pound to it, you can easily tell me that the second load is heavier. But if I give you a 50-pound weight and then add one pound to it, it will be much harder for you to tell that you are holding 51 pounds vs. 50.
If we created a graph of your ‘subjective feeling of weight’, versus the objective weight, the subjective feeling would go up more steeply in the beginning — because you can tell the difference when the initial weight is low; but as you get to higher amounts of weight, your perception of that incremental change gets smaller and smaller, and it kind of flattens out at a certain point.
We have found the same effect with time: One week more time waiting for something seems like really a big deal for something where the normal wait time is two weeks —
Whether it’s the clothing you wear, the kind of car you drive or the music you listen to, all of these things send signals to other people about your identity.
but is not a big deal for something where the normal wait time is twelve weeks.
Recently, you’ve been studying ‘pro-social consumption’. How do you define it?
In the past couple of decades, researchers have started to look beyond how this research can help marketers — to consider how consumer research can help people lead better, healthier lives. I would define pro-social consumption as consumption based on the notion that ‘buying or consuming this product will have positive consequences for others’. That can range from making a donation to a cause to buying an environmentally-friendly product.
My colleagues and I have looked at the effects of different forms of positive emotions on pro-social behaviours. Most academics study negative emotions because they are more differentiated. Anger is clearly quite different from fear, which is clearly different from sadness, and so on; on the other hand, positive emotions tend to get bunched together, but we felt that distinct positive emotions could also be differentiated and that they might affect behaviour in different ways.
We looked at how the presence of emotions like love, hope, pride and compassion in messaging are related to things like donating to a charity. We had a theory, namely that the important way in which these emotions differ is the degree to which they relate to how closely you connect with others. Love, for example, is all about connection; while pride is more about ‘me’ and how I am separated from others.
We found that, if you ask people whether they want to help someone who is located close to them (for instance, someone who lives in their city), most people say Yes. And, if you make the person feel good about themselves, they are even more likely to say Yes. It’s when you ask them to help with a cause that is not physically close to them that the positive emotion you choose to invoke makes a difference.
For instance, we found that love is much more effective at getting people to donate to causes that are more psychologically distant. You can imagine either a love-focused ad (i.e. showing a father hugging his child) or a pride-focused ad (‘Think of how proud you’ll be to have made a difference’); we found that the latter actually makes people less likely to want to donate to distant causes.
To me, the most fascinating aspect of human decisionmaking behaviour is the flexibility and dynamism with which people respond to a wide variety of different environmental conditions. Even very minor changes in a decision environment can affect people’s choices. The issue is, if our preferences are affected by subtle changes in the presentation of information, decision makers become vulnerable to ‘strategic manipulation’ — and they should always be aware of that.
Academics have started to consider how their research can help consumers lead better, healthier lives.
James R. Bettman is the Burlington Industries Professor of Business Administration, a member of the Marketing area at the Fuqua School of Business and Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University. Most of his papers can be downloaded online.