Consumer Science: Posts

Why changing "Raider" into "Twix" might have been a bad idea.

Bram Van den Bergh — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 03:03:20 GMT

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I was reading a curious paper yesterday. It starts with the following paragraph: "On July 4, 1997, NASA landed the Pathfinder spacecraft on the surface of Mars. This “Mission to Mars” captured media attention worldwide over the course of the following months, and during this period, candy maker Mars Inc. also noticed a rather unusual increase in sales (White 1997). Although the Mars Bar takes its name from the company founder and not from Earth’s neighboring planet, consumers apparently responded to news about the planet Mars by purchasing more Mars Bars. This was a lucky turn of events for the candy company, but what does it mean for understanding consumer choice?" Although the authors suggest that this is a 'lucky turn', it might be not so lucky after all. I'm pretty sure that word 'raider' is more common in English than the word 'twix'. If you would believe what is being argued by Jonah Berger in that paper, we should use brand names that "exist". Watching Lara Croft in Tomb RAIDER or Indiana in RAIDERS of the lost ark, might boost the sales of Raider, but not of Twix. Thus, picking an "existing word" as a brand name might enhance sales. I'm wondering whether this may explain why Windows was more readily adopted than Apple. Anyone in for a word count comparing "window" vs "apple"?

Published: 9/4/2008 4:54 AM

Ugly people date ugly people and they know it.

Bram Van den Bergh — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 23:14:12 GMT

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Leonard Lee, assistant marketing professor at Columbia University, has once again published a very cool paper. He shows that physically attractive people not only are popular targets for romantic pursuits, but also tend to flock together: More attractive people tend to prefer potential dates who are more attractive. This means that "ugly" people have to settle with "ugly" people. The cool thing about this paper is that it is demonstrated that ugly people are not blind: Less attractive people are willing to accept less attractive others as dating partners, but they do not delude themselves into thinking that ugly others are more physically attractive than they really are. Whether this means that love cannot makes us blind is not clear, but it is evident that ugly individuals are fully aware of the fact that they are dating ugly partners. That is probably why a question like "is she pretty?" is sometimes answered with "she is really nice"...

Published: 8/29/2008 1:01 AM

Yellow jersey and medication

Bram Van den Bergh — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 10:32:21 GMT

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The Tour de France is over. Whatever cyclists swallow and inject: I continue to like it. What a pity it's over. And yes, it was a rather boring Tour, but if we want a clean sport, we shouldn't complain. (Although I must admit that I adored that attack of Ricco)

The mecenas of the Silence-Lotto team, Marc Coucke, said in an interview that the yellow jersey of Cadel Evans has lead to less snoring in the world. I'm wondering what the commercial impact of a yellow jersey might be and I think it is absolutely striking that a cycling event could increase the sales of a drug. I'm pretty sure that our marketing modelers might come up with fascinating tools to test whether the increase in sales of Silence, might be driven by the legs of Cadel Evans. Time-series modeling should be able to provide an answer to that question. And why not test this hypothesis for each sponsor in the tour, and for the green, white and other jerseys. I even believe that the negative publicitity due to doping might not be so harmful for Saunier Duval after all. I'm interested to see the results. Who will test this?

Published: 7/29/2008 12:14 PM

Lingerie and Hawaiian punch

Bram Van den Bergh — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 08:10:39 GMT

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Monica Wadwha, a great graduate student from Stanford, has recently published a paper in the Journal of Marketing Research. The findings bear very close resemblance to some of the findings I've investigated myself: I have demonstrated that touching a bra leads you to want money or candy bars right now. The recent paper in JMR demonstrates that sampling a good tasting drink has similar effects as touching lingerie: Sipping from a flavored beverage that tastes good not only enhances subsequent consumption of Pepsi but also prompts people to seek anything rewarding such as chocolate, a massage, or a dream vacation in Bora Bora. What I find spectacular and interesting is that Monica Wadhwa demonstrates that this effect is regulated by the exact same mechanisms as the effect of sexual cues. Whether you see bikinis, whether you smell chocolate cookies, whether you sample Hawaiian punch, whether you taste milk chocolate... does not seem to make that big of a difference: all of these cues lead to the same reward seeking behaviors.

Published: 7/16/2008 9:20 AM

Bram and his bikini-clad women are all over the news

Bart Claus — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 09:27:12 GMT

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Several newspapers and blogs reported on the publication of Bram's JCR paper about sexual stimuly and generalized impatience.

PsyBlog wrote a nice article with additional background about the general reward system.
Sciencedaily also reported on this publication
The same goes for EurekAlert , Psychology Today, ...
...and some Dutch and Belgian newspapers like De Standaard and Het NRC Handelsblad, both doing a very good job in explaining the effect in detail and with journalistic rigour.

Of course, articles like these are a great excuse for some very nice supporting graphic material, like this

(Property of "De Standaard")

Or this

(Property of "NRC Handelsblad")

Allow me to say "Score!", and congrats to Bram.

Update: also a very nice and accurate summary on Dutch Magazine Carp's website here !

Category: Our papers published;Spotted in the media

Published: 6/12/2008 10:44 AM

Social Engagement 2.0

Bart Claus — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 17:07:46 GMT

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Social networking on the web 2.0 is all very well, but what can society really get out of this except for the economic loss of people adjusting their profile on MSN, facebook, myspace, hyves or the like or twittering away voids in between coffee-breaks.

(Wow, just re-read this and I think I'm getting old)

Anyway, now we can say: charity! Social engagement! Culture! Because amazee.com is a full-fledged web 2.0 application that encourages people to get together in the pursuit of fullfilling their projects. The best three projects even get $10.000 to accomplish their goal. And like it should be in a web 2.0 application: you get to decide what are the best three projects.

Category: Spotted in the media

Published: 6/25/2008 6:49 PM

Bram Likes Plain White Cotton Bra's best...

Bart Claus — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 16:31:55 GMT

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...or at least, that's what he reveiled during his interview on national radio about his JCR-publication about sexual stimuli and generalized impatience in men.

I figured him more imaginative I must say. Anyhow, the interview can be listened to here. Only in Dutch however.

Update: a link to StuBru's page about the interview here

Category: Our papers published;Spotted in the media

Published: 6/25/2008 6:25 PM

Marketing "Science"

Bram Van den Bergh — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 07:38:36 GMT

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It seems that our discipline is raising in status. Marketing professors are now publishing in the most impactful journals in the world (see e.g., this post). In the latest issue of PNAS, Jonah Berger, assistant professor of marketing at Wharton, studied whether the location of a polling station can influence how people vote. It mattered: Individuals who voted in schools were more likely to support a proposition to increase funding for education. This leaves voters more vulnerable to being swayed by their surroundings... We know that pleasant music in a store might influence spending, but it strikes me that important decisions such as votes might be susceptible to these ambient cues. (Nature News has an excellent summary of the paper).

Published: 6/24/2008 9:17 AM

Bumper stickers

Bram Van den Bergh — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 20:55:16 GMT

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I've always been amazed by the use of bumper stickers. Why would someone advertise for a radio station or a theme park on his/her car? The owner is not even paid for attaching these ugly stickers, although we do demand a fee when a billboard is attached to our house. I have always found this an intriguing phenomenon. It ruins the design of a car in my opinion. A recent study has now confirmed what I have always suspected: You shouldn't trust people that attach stickers to their car. It's better to avoid them.

Published: 6/17/2008 10:41 PM

How professors market themselves.

Bram Van den Bergh — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 08:13:42 GMT

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Did you ever wonder about the length of the signatures of your colleagues? New research has shown that the signature of an email may function like a sportscar or some other signaling product, albeit a signal that is easy to fake. A recent paper in the European Journal of Social Psychology has shown that professors with lower rates of publications and citations displayed more professional titles in their email signatures compared to professors with higher publication and citation rates. Next time i see "professor doctor engineer" on a business card, i know what he/she is hiding :-) (full paper).

Published: 6/15/2008 10:08 AM

Bikini-Clad Women Make Men Impatient

Bram Van den Bergh — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 08:05:10 GMT

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Images of sexy women tend to whet men’s sexual appetite. But stimulating new research in the Journal of Consumer Research says there’s more than meets the eye. A recent study shows that men who watched sexy videos or handled lingerie sought immediate gratification—even when they were making decisions about money, soda, and candy.

Authors Bram Van den Bergh, Siegfried DeWitte, and Luk Warlop (KULeuven, Belgium) found that the desire for immediate rewards increased in men who touched bras, looked at pictures of beautiful women, or watched video clips of young women in bikinis running through a park.

“It seems that sexual appetite causes a greater urgency to consume anything rewarding,” the authors suggest. Thus, the activation of sexual desire appears to spill over into other brain systems involved in reward-seeking behaviors, even the cognitive desire for money.

“After they touched a bra, men are more likely to be content with a smaller immediate monetary reward,” writes Bram Van den Bergh, one of the study’s authors. “Prior exposure to sexy stimuli may influence the choice between chocolate cake or fruit for dessert.”

The authors believe the stimuli bring men’s minds to the present as opposed to the future. “The study demonstrates that bikinis cause a shift in time preference: Men live in the here and now when they glance at pictures featuring women in lingerie. That is, men will choose the immediately available rewards and seek immediate gratification after sex cue exposure.”

Do all straight men respond the same? Actually, no. Some men are highly responsive to rewards while others are not so sensitive, and the more reward-sensitive men are the impatient ones.

In fact, doing a task designed to inspire financial satisfaction reduced the bikini-inspired impatience, just as feeling full reduces food cravings. Men may want to be aware of bikinis’ effects on their bank accounts and waistlines. (Press Release JCR)

Listen to the podcast on the website of Scientific American, read a summary in Psychology Today or on Psyblog, or read the full paper.

Published: 6/11/2008 10:02 AM

Are you a good people reader?

Bart Claus — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 08:14:44 GMT

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BBC online put out an online "Spot the fake smile" survey in which you can test for yourself how good you are at discriminating between a genuine and a fake smile.

Research about what facial expressions reveal about emotional states dates back to 1978 when Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen set out the Facial Action Coding System or FACS, an inventory of facial muscle movements and their corresponding emotional states. These days, this inventory is the basis for several software applications that can perform automated readings.

Find out for yourself how easy or hard you find it to read people's faces at http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/mind/surveys/smiles/index.shtml

Reference:

Ekman, P., & Friesen. W.V. (1978). The Facial Action Coding system: A technique for the measurement of facial movement. Consulting Psychologists Press, Palo Alto, CA.

Category: social psych;web;Spotted in the media

Published: 6/6/2008 9:41 AM

Green or yellow banana?

Bram Van den Bergh — Sun, 18 May 2008 19:38:17 GMT

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John Bargh will publish an funny article in the June issue of Psychological Science. He shows that people in a "mating mindset" not only prefer younger women over elderly women, but also prefer yellow bananas over green bananas, more than people in control conditions who had to read about the interior of a building. These findings suggest that mating primes lead to a "ripeness" bias. He demonstrated that only evolutionary ancient objects as fruits or flowers were affected by mating primes, but "novel" objects such as a 'ripe' car rolling off the assembly line, were unaffected. Thus, thinking about sex leads to a preference for "ripe" objects. What a crazy hypothesis!

see: http://www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman/2008/05/primed-for-ripeness.cfm

Published: 5/18/2008 9:28 PM

Difficult donation decisions

Bram Van den Bergh — Thu, 15 May 2008 09:55:58 GMT

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I have long been interested in how people divide money between themselves and others, but only rarely I have asked myself the question how people divide money among others (not including themselves). The authors of a paper published in Science have monitored the brain activity of individuals while they make a difficult donation decision. Imagine you need to donate 10 meals to an orphanage. Do you decide to give all these meals to one child so it does not feel hungry for a couple of days and leave the rest of the children hungry? Or do you evenly distribute a smaller amount of food so that each child feels full for just a few hours? It seems that people prefer to take away five meals from two children rather than 10 meals from one child. People seem to prefer to share the burden over different children. But if the number of meals is different ("take away 15 meals from child A" vs "take away 9 meals from B and 9 meals from C") people do not seem to prefer an equal or equitable distribution but tend to act "for the greater good". Based on neurological evidence, the authors were able to isolate two different moral motivations: One brain region became more active when subjects considered more inequitable distributions of meals, while another brain region seemed to track the common good, rising in proportion to the total number of meals that could be donated in a given case. I do not only like these findings, but I especially like the computer program they used to test these ideas. Take a look at two very short videos (video1 & video2) to see how participants in the experiments had to make their decisions. Nice!

Read the press release for more information.

Published: 5/15/2008 11:32 AM

The complete collection of Charles Darwin's work online

Bart Claus — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 08:32:02 GMT

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Scans of the original work, including books, drafts, drawings, but also transcripts and audio editions of this vast oeuvre are now available for free for all of those interested. Reasons why you might want to have a look are the beautiful illustrations, the travel stories about journeys with the MS Beagle to, amongst others, the Galapagos Islands, a window of time into historical scientific practice, the stunning rigor and detail of Darwin’s work, or, not in the least, being able to browse through the development of turn pike scientific ideas that continue to reverberate throughout our thinking and that, every day, are an inspiration for new research. Make no mistake, Darwin’s work stretches far beyond evolutionary theory alone.

The project of putting this mass amount of work online – according to this bbc article, downloading one page per minute would keep you busy for two months – was run by Dr John van Wyhe, who came up with the idea out of frustration with difficulties of being able to Study Darwin himself.

http://darwin-online.org.uk/

Category: Spotted in the media

Published: 4/24/2008 10:05 AM

My dreamteam

Bram Van den Bergh — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 18:34:24 GMT

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Two of my favorite marketing professors (Mike & Dan) have decided to form a dreamteam and write up a paper together. It's hardly surprising that I find this article interesting. Convince yourself. See Dan marketing his paper on youtube.

Published: 4/22/2008 8:24 PM

Rebirth of Barbie

Luk Warlop — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 16:26:47 GMT

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An interesting little story on 'Marketingprofs' today about the repositioning of Barbie. The outdated image of the bimbo-ish, unrealisticly shaped model is being replaced by that of confident, smart, powerful heroine in adventure stories (be it that those are modern renditions of classic fairy tales). Having daughters in the target group, I have seen some of the fairy-tale movies. Barbie is not sleeping beauty but more like a blond haired Lara Croft: she does not wait for the kiss of the prince but rescues him from prison by outsmarting the bad guys.

The repositioning seems to work, the story says. Barbie is doing well in the market place. The Movie-Barbie looks different from the plastic doll barbie, too. Still more like Miss Belgium than like my sister, but at least her waist-to-hip ratio seems to fall within the realm of humanly possible values.

Interesting to see whether public perception will follow. In the mean time: an interesting story for the marketing class.

Category: Spotted in the media

Published: 4/18/2008 6:03 PM

The rewarding nature of fairness

Bram Van den Bergh — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 07:50:49 GMT

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In the recent issue of Psychological science, an interesting paper demonstrates that receiving a fair offer in a bargaining game leads to activation of neurological reward regions. Economic models of decision making have traditionally assumed that individuals are motivated solely by material utility (e.g., financial payouts) and are not directly affected by social factors such as fairness. This paper however suggests that people may prefer fair outcomes at the cost of material utility in part because they hedonically value fairness itself. This is interesting because it may provide an explanation for why exposure to sexual cues, such as bras (activating reward centres in our brain), leads to a greater likelihood of accepting unfair offers. Or would prior activation of reward centres not affect reward centre activation following fair offers?

Published: 4/9/2008 9:43 AM

Sex and financial risk seeking

Bram Van den Bergh — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 18:49:21 GMT

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Brian Knutson has published an interesting paper bearing resemblance to some of the things I'm investigating myself. In the recent issue of Neuroreport, he shows that viewing erotic pictures leads to financial risk seeking. Not only is this closely related to some of my own findings, he was even able to show that this effect is driven by activation of neurological reward centres, like I have hypothesized in my own paper. As noted by the Neuromarketing blog, these kinds of effects have powerful marketing implications. Read it and convince yourself!

Published: 4/3/2008 8:42 PM

Money buys happiness and how to market the idea

Bram Van den Bergh — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 14:33:46 GMT

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One of my favorite marketing professors, Mike Norton from the Harvard Business School, has published a cute article in Science Magazine this week. He shows that spending money on others promotes happiness. Of course, we have known this for decades (e.g. the warm glow effect), but it is always cute to see how he is able to sell an old idea to a top journal like Science Magazine. It seems one needs to study marketing to get this published :-)

Mike shows that personal spending is unrelated to happiness, but higher prosocial spending (gifts for others and donations to charity) is associated with greater happiness. In one of their studies, participants were given an envelope that contained either $5 or $20, which they were asked to spend by 5:00 p.m. that day. Participants assigned to the personal spending condition were instructed to spend the money on a bill, an expense, or a gift for themselves, whereas participants assigned to the prosocial spending condition were instructed to spend the money on a gift for someone else or charitable donation. Participants were called after 5:00 p.m. that day and reported their happiness. Participants in the prosocial spending condition reported greater happiness than did participants in the personal spending condition.

It is a cute paper reporting an effect we have known for several years and we should admire Mike that he is able to sell old wine in an old bag and that he gets away with it. The power of marketing within top journals!

Published: 3/28/2008 3:19 PM

Placebo effects of marketing actions, the sequel

Bram Van den Bergh — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 21:14:16 GMT

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Dan Ariely does it again. For the second time, he shows placebo effects of marketing actions: He had individuals rate the pain caused by electric shocks before and after taking a pill. Half of the individuals read that the pill was regularly priced at $2.50 per dose. The other half read that it had been discounted to 10 cents. In fact, both were placebos. When people get more expensive painkillers (placebos!) they expect a lot and get a lot of pain relief, but when the price of these pills is discounted, the expectations are lowered and so is their efficacy. As it turns out, with painkillers, we sometimes get what we pay for. A great study!

Check the "newest" placebo paper here; check the "older" placebo paper here; check Dan Ariely's blog here; check the NYT on the placebo paper.

Published: 3/8/2008 10:05 PM

Testosterone-soaked brains more sensitive to motivating situations

Siegfried Dewitte — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 11:51:21 GMT

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Individual differences and personality factors do not enthuse consumer scientists a great lot. Typically individual difference variables such as ‘deal proneness’ are measured via self-report measures and merely describe types rather than adding anything to our understanding of consumer behavior. It reveals insights like ‘consumers high on deal proneness are more prone to deals’. A different picture emerges when stable physical characteristics such as 2D4D are found to predict economic decisions. Although we do not know what 2D4D exactly is, reported associations suggest that low 2D4D have brains that have been soaked in testosterone prenatally. This soaking appears to have a broad impact on human functioning and affects general behavioral tendencies that we call ambition, aggression, and moral rigidness, see Manning (2002) for a review of many of these findings.

In a recent paper of our group, appearing in American Journal of Human Biology, we show that putting testosterone-soaked brains in a low status situation makes them impulsive. They are impatient with respect to money. It seems as if they would do anything to escape the low-status situation. This paper is part of a series of papers published by our group in which we add an important caution to the 2D4D literature. The weak correlations appearing in that literature are misleading. The relations between 2D4D and (economic) behavior emerge often only (but strongly) in certain situations and not in others. This paper follows up on other work showing that aggressive videos trigger aggression only in testosterone-soaked brains, and that pretty women make testosterone-soaked brains mild negotiators.

Category: Our papers published;consumer behavior

Published: 2/20/2008 12:35 PM

How a traffic jam is born

Bart Claus — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 09:37:52 GMT

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In a very cool experiment reported on by this month’s New Scientist, some Japanese researchers have recreated the birth of traffic jams by using the clever trick of letting the cars drive around in a circle.

Watch the movie

The article

Published: 3/7/2008 10:31 AM

Let's leave the free will debate to philosophers

Siegfried Dewitte — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 15:36:41 GMT

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Focusing on causes rather than on the essence of phenomena, including human behavior, has pushed science forward. Also social science has benefited from relying on the working hypothesis that free will is not a valid causal factor in the science of human behavior. Economists assume that us humans blindly maximize utility and psychologists assume that our behavior relies on genetics, learning, and the environment. Assuming otherwise may tempt researchers into prematurely declaring a phenomenon unexplainable.

A persisting problem, however, is that this view conflicts with our daily life assumptions. It is not surprising, then, that scientists have tried to accomodate the notion of free will in standard theories. Roger Penrose has written several books on the topic and the field of Consumer Psychology now also seems to reopen the debate. In their lead article in the Journal of Consumer Psychology of this month, Baumeister and his colleagues claim that exerting self-control reflects free will.

In a recent paper appearing in the same issue Sabrina Bruyneel and her co-authors Klaus Wertenbroch (Insead) and Joachim Vosgerau (CMU) argue that there is no room in psychology to debate whether or not free will exists. The only thing that we need in the scientific study of human behavior is the assumption that people believe in free will.

Category: consumer behavior;Our papers published

Published: 3/2/2008 4:24 PM

After Tupperware and Upperdare...

Bart Claus — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 15:03:37 GMT

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An article in the NYT about the latest trend in home party's, EcoMoms, discussing how to achieve ecological efficiency in the household...(and maybe discussing a bit of Al Gore's buttocks or something like that too).

Ecological awareness really has left the hippie-sandal-tree hugger atmosphere hasn't it...?

Category: Spotted in the media

Published: 2/19/2008 3:55 PM

Avoid hospitals on weekends?

Bram Van den Bergh — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 19:55:35 GMT

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Most often, you do not have the option of postponing a hospital visit, but according to an article published in the New York Times, there is growing evidence that hospital mortality rates are higher on weekends. I find this quite thought provoking... What if hospital A has a better reputation than hospital B but can only treat me on a Saturday (because it is so popular), whereas hospital B can schedule my operation on a Wednesday? Medical decisions are never easy and these findings only make it worse. Sometimes it's just better to be ignorant?

Category: Spotted in the media

Published: 2/12/2008 8:39 PM

The prehistory of branding

Bram Van den Bergh — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 15:27:08 GMT

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In the current issue of "Current Anthropology", David Wengrow challenges the widespread assumption that branding did not become an important force in social and economic life until the Industrial Revolution. He argues that attachment to brands far predates modern capitalism: Commodity branding has been a long-term feature of human cultural development. Check out his arguments here.

Published: 2/17/2008 4:15 PM