Right mix of purchases can ease shopping shame, study finds
Scholars from a prestigious American business school have united to address one of the most important questions of the modern age: Does hemorrhoid ointment become less embarrassing when paired with the purchase of a magazine?
Reporting in the Journal of Consumer Research, Neal Roese and Sean Blair investigate whether the anticipated humiliation of a purchase can be quelled by the addition of non-embarrassing products. Not only did they find this strategy was unreliable in diminishing mortification, in some cases it actually made things worse.
“What matters ... is not the individual products; what matters is the set of products,” said lead author Blair, a doctoral candidate in marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
“It’s about what this basket says about me, and the story that (the contents) are telling.”
Across five experiments with more than 700 people, Roese — a noted professor of marketing — and Blair found that the nature of a shopping basket’s composition plays a pivotal role in whether anticipated embarrassment is suppressed.
When the additional products are unrelated to the embarrassing product — say, adding new underwear to the purchase of an anti-odour foot powder — the strategy indeed tends to lower the chances of flushed cheeks. However, when the additional products are complementary — adding new underwear to the purchase of anti-diarrheal medication — people’s embarrassment is exacerbated.
“What really matters isn’t how much something hides an embarrassing product — though that could be part of it,” Blair said. “It’s about how it relates to the embarrassing product.”
Unsurprisingly, self-consciousness is a factor.
Take, for example, an experiment in which male consumers were sent to the drugstore to purchase either anti-gas medication or condoms. In addition to the embarrassing product, they could add a bottle of lotion and a box of tissues at no personal cost.
Males who were less selfconscious took the freebies regardless of the embarrassing product they’d been assigned to buy. But highly self-conscious males were much more likely to decline the freebies when they were complementary to the main purchase (condoms) than when they were unrelated (anti-gas meds).
“It’s an interesting commentary on the social nature of human beings,” Blair said.
“Cashiers are people we don’t know and will probably never see again, yet we care so much what they think that we’re willing to spend money buying things we don’t want, and even give up free stuff” just to save face.
Notably, when additional products did reduce embarrassment, it appeared to be related to the products’ capacity to compensate for the main purchase.
This bears out in an experiment in which consumers were asked to imagine their level of embarrassment if purchasing The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Improving Your IQ. Half were told the book was the sole purchase, while the other half were told they were also buying two counterbalancing products: a Rubik’s Cube and a copy of Scientific American.
Those in the latter group indeed reported less embarrassment because they felt the additional products cancelled out the undesirable impression of the book.
A followup study showed that the more people believed that a shopping basket’s contents compensated for an embarrassing product, the more effective those other items were at reducing humiliation.