What You See Affects What You Get

Many marketers consider consumers a fickle and unpredictable lot, known to change their purchasing decisions as quickly as winds shift, without being able to say why. In part, suggest two researchers, that’s because subtle cues in the environment influence consumers without their knowledge.

How Environmental Cues Influence Product Evaluation and Choice, a January 2007 working paper forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing Research, explains how consumers’ behavior is affected by their everyday environment — cues such as writing with a pen of a certain color, or the link between pets and brands with animal associations. Jonah Berger, assistant professor of marketing at Wharton Business School, and Gráinne Fitzsimons, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Waterloo, conducted a series of field studies and experiments to determine how peoples’ product evaluations and purchase decisions might be influenced by their surroundings.

In one experiment, 29 participants completed a survey, for which each was given a pen that wrote either with orange or green ink. After a brief writing exercise to ensure that participants had seen the ink color, the participants chose which product they preferred from sets of pictures of consumer goods ranging from beverages to detergents to candy.

The results demonstrated that merely exposing participants to more of a certain color acted as a perceptual cue and led them to prefer products associated with that color: Those who wrote in orange were more likely to choose products associated with that color, such as Sunkist soda; those who wrote in green were more likely to choose a product that was green in color, such as lemon-lime Gatorade. Pen color made no difference for control sets that had neither orange nor green products.

Of course, completing a survey is a long way from actual consumption. So the researchers conducted other studies to help bridge that gap. In one field study, 59 undergraduate students were each shown one of two slogans — “Live the healthy way, eat five fruits and veggies a day,” or “Each and every dining hall tray, needs five fruits and veggies a day” — halfway into a two-week study of their eating habits. The first slogan was better liked in a pretest survey of different students. Yet those who saw the second slogan and ate in dining halls that used trays ate more fruits and vegetables in the week after they saw the slogan. “The problem with the first slogan,” says Berger, “was that there was nothing in the environment to remind people, or cue them, to think of it.”

When it came to affecting actual consumption, using the slogan to link the product with the actual dining environment was more important than just creating a memorable slogan. “Marketers think a lot about making slogans catchy,” Berger says. “But we tend not to think as much about people’s environments, and how the cues in those environments might bring products and slogans to mind.”

And those cues need not be as obvious as a dining tray rhyme. In the last experiment, 109 people completed two ostensibly unrelated studies. The first involved showing the participants various images, including some of dogs. The second measured how accessible, or top of mind, different brands were for the participants. One of the brands was Puma, a sneaker brand with a puma cat in its logo. Sure enough, those participants who saw more pictures of dogs were more likely to have the Puma brand closer to the top of their mind. The dog images acted as conceptual cues that brought related brands, in this case, Puma, to mind. Importantly, participants were asked at the end whether the two studies were related. None believed so, indicating that they were not conscious of the fact that exposure to the images might have influenced their behavior.

Skeptical that such environmental cues actually affect product purchasing in the real world? Consider the unusual increase in Mars candy bar sales in the summer of 1997 — right after NASA’s Pathfinder spacecraft landed on the planet Mars. Though the candy gets its name from the company founders, rather than the red planet, as the authors explain, the Pathfinder headlines acted as a serendipitous environmental cue that might have influenced consumers’ behavior. Along the same lines, the authors conjecture, it’s possible that people who live in coastal communities and presumably see waves more frequently might prefer Tide detergent, all else being equal. Marketers could be more proactive in creating and taking advantage of such environmental cues.

By the same token, however, marketers might want to avoid making the associations too blatant. In this paper, Berger and Fitzsimons demonstrated that priming occurs nonconsciously. However, they did not study what happens when consumers become aware of a marketer’s ploy. If consumers realize the link between the environmental cue and the product association, they might discount their product choice, or even go so far as to resent the marketer’s manipulations.

For more information, contact Jonah Berger at bergerj@wharton.upenn.edu or Gráinne Fitzsimons at grainne@uwaterloo.ca.