Caglar Irmak

Choice of cause in cause-related marketing

Spurred by the consumer demand for companies to be socially responsible, cause-related marketing (CM), in which fund raising for a cause is tied to purchase of a firms products, has become popular in recent years. The authors demonstrate the conditions in which CM campaigns that allow consumers to choose the cause that receives the donation lead to greater consumer support than those in which the company determines the cause. They show that choice in this context is helpful as long as it increases consumers’ perception of personal role in helping the cause. Specifically, allowing consumers to select the cause in a CM campaign is more likely to enhance perceived personal role and, thus, purchase intentions (1) for those consumers who are high (vs. low) in collectivism and (2) when the company and causes have low (vs. high) perceptual fit. Finally, the authors show that under certain conditions, choice may have a negative impact on perceived personal role and consumer support of CM campaigns.

The Impact of Product Name on Dieters’ and Nondieters’ Food Evaluations and Consumption

This research explores the impact of merely altering the name of a food on dieters’ and nondieters’ evaluations of the food’s healthfulness and taste, as well as consumption. Four studies demonstrate that when a food is identified by a relatively unhealthy name (e.g., pasta), dieters perceive the item to be less healthful and less tasty than do nondieters. When the identical food is assigned a relatively healthy name (e.g., salad), however, dieting tendency has no effect on product evaluations. This effect, which results in differences in actual food consumption, is explained by nondieters’ insensitivity to food cues as well as dieters’ reliance on cues indicating a lack of healthfulness and tendency to employ heuristic information processing when evaluating foods. These findings contribute to the body of literature that explores both individual and contextual factors that influence food evaluation and consumption.

The Placebo Effect in Marketing: Sometimes You Just Have to Want It to Work

In their article, Shiv, Carmon, and Ariely (2005, hereinafter SCA) document for the first time that nonconscious expectations about the relationship between price and quality can influence consumers in a placebo-like manner. Even when the price paid for a good has absolutely no relationship to its actual quality, consumers’ nonconscious beliefs about the price‐quality relationship change their actual experience with the good. As Berns (2005) notes, performance is enhanced beyond the baseline by drawing attention to the marketing claims surrounding the product. Broadly speaking, a placebo has been defined in the medical literature as “a substance or procedure that has no inherent power to produce an effect that is sought or expected” (Stewart-Williams and Podd 2004). In more colloquial terms, a placebo is essentially a “sugar pill.” Such placebo effects have been observed in numerous medical settings, from relatively benign maladies, such as warts and the common cold, to more serious diseases, such as diabetes, angina, and cancer (Kirsch 1997). Across multiple medical domains, the placebo effect has been shown to be enduring and even capable of reversing the effects of active medications (Kirsch 1997). In marketing, a placebo of this form might be a brand that claims to have certain properties that it does not actually possess and, through such claims, changes the consumer’s behavior. In their work, SCA demonstrate that expectations play an important role in marketing placebo effects. Indeed, support for the efficacy of expectations goes back more than 1700 years: “He cures most in whom most are confident” (Galen, qtd. in Jensen and Karoly 1991). In the study we report herein, we extend SCA’s results by demonstrating the importance of motivation—a person’s desire to experience the product’s purported benefits—as a driver of marketing placebo effects. Motivation has also been shown to play a strong role in medical placebo studies such that when people want the physical symptoms, a placebo effect more likely will manifest (Jensen and Karoly 1991; Vase et al. 2003). We also extend and support SCA’s findings by documenting for the first time a sugar pill placebo effect for everyday

The Endowment Effect as Self-Enhancement in Response to Threat

The discrepancy between willingness to pay (WTP) and willingness to accept (WTA) for a product, referred to as the endowment effect, has been investigated and replicated across various domains because of its implications for rational decision making. The authors assume that implicit processes operate in the endowment effect and propose an explanation that is derived from the two main accounts of the effect, ownership and loss aversion. Based on the implicit egotism and self-affirmation literatures, the model argues that selling is perceived as an implicit self-threat and that sellers, as a part of their automatic defense mechanism, respond to this self-threat by enhancing the value of the self-associated object. Five studies test these conjectures and provide support for the proposed model.

Having Versus Consuming: Failure to Estimate Usage Frequency Makes Consumers Prefer Multifeature Products

The authors investigate whether consumers systematically consider feature usage before making multifunctional product purchase decisions. Across five studies and four product domains, the article shows that consumers fail to estimate their feature usage rate before purchasing multifunctional products, negatively affecting product satisfaction. The findings demonstrate that when consumers do estimate their feature usage before choice, preferences shift from many-feature products toward few-feature products. The authors show that this shift in preferences is due to a change in elaboration from having features to using features, and they identify three key moderators to the effect: need for cognition, feature trivialness, and materialism. Finally, the authors investigate the downstream consequences of usage estimation on product satisfaction, demonstrating that consumers who estimate usage before choice experience greater product satisfaction and are more likely to recommend their chosen product. These results point to the relative importance consumers place on having versus using product features.

Licensing indulgence in the present by distorting memories of past behavior

In the face of an opportunity to indulge, individuals may consult their memories in order to ascertain whether enough progress has been made toward a self-regulatory goal in order to justify indulgence. This research demonstrates that in such situations, impulsive individuals who possess a regulatory goal are likely to distort memories of past behavior, manufacturing goal progress in order to license indulgence in the present. In four studies, this effect is demonstrated in the domains of eating, spending, and studying, and alternative processes are ruled out. Furthermore, it is shown that perceptions of goal progress drive impulsive (vs. nonimpulsive) peoples greater likelihood of engaging in behavior inconsistent with their regulatory goal. These findings provide insights into the domains of goal pursuit, impulsivity, and memory distortion.

Predicting the Emergence of Innovations from Technological Convergence: Lessons from the Twentieth Century

This article takes a historical perspective to examine technological convergences that occurred throughout the twentieth century in an attempt to gain insights that may be helpful today. It analyzes five case histories where experts predicted that two or more existing technologies would converge to create an entirely new product and market. The cases are studied for their unique points of difference as well as for their commonalities. They lead to the conclusion that despite the confidence and enthusiasm in the forecasts, the convergences typically took decades longer than expected and often materialized in forms that bore little resemblance to the original predictions. Failures occurred for a variety of reasons, ranging from a lack of market acceptance to a waning of one of the original technologies prior to the convergence. The results have implications for businesses and consumers concerned with current predictions of new technological convergences.

Efficacy Expectations and Adherence: Evidence of Consumer Biases and Heuristics in Pharmaceutical Marketing

Pharmaceutical non-adherence is a major issue in both the United States and worldwide. In fact, lack of medication adherence has been called “America’s other drug problem.” It is estimated that globally only about 50 % of patients take their medicines as prescribed, and in the United States the annual cost of poor adherence has been estimated to be approximately

You Like What I Like, but I Don’t Like What You Like: Uniqueness Motivations in Product Preferences

177 billion. In this chapter, we cull from the vast body of work in consumer behavior those theories of consumer processing that are directly relevant to this behavioral problem. Although many factors influence (non)adherence to medicines, we focus our chapter on perceived efficacy since a consumer’s perception of poor product efficacy is one of the primary reasons for non-adherence with a particular medicine and a major cause of brand switching. We identify the biases, heuristics, and lay theories consumers use to infer and judge pharmaceutical product efficacy at two primary stages of the evaluation process: pre-consumption efficacy expectations that drive initial adherence and post-consumption efficacy judgments that drive continued adherence. For example, consumers employ a no-pain-no-gain rule of thumb when judging product efficacy such that products with stronger side effects or bad taste are judged more effective than those without. Given the detrimental consequences of non-adherence in terms of health risks to consumers and losses for the pharmaceutical industry in general, we suggest that efforts to enhance efficacy perceptions are key in creating value for all constituents in the pharmaceutical marketing chain—from manufacturers to end users.