100 Years Of Style

o

100 Years Of Style

What's Next? A Panel On The Future

PSFK CONFERENCE NYC 2011: What's Next? A Panel On The Future from Piers Fawkes on Vimeo.
o

What's Next? A Panel On The Future

Retail Recession Survival Tactics

Retail Recession Survival Tactics

View more presentations from MAgnus Ohlsson

o

Retail Recession Survival Tactics

Getting Retail Right

o

Getting Retail Right

Fresh Insights, Better Decisions, Great Outcomes

Download the article by clicking here.o

Fresh Insights, Better Decisions, Great Outcomes

Economic Inequality Is Linked To Biased Self-Perception

Pretty much everybody thinks they’re better than average. But in some cultures, people are more self-aggrandizing than in others. Until now, national differences in “self-enhancement” have been chalked up to an East-West individualism-versus-collectivism divide. In the West, where people value independence, personal success, and uniqueness, psychologists have said, self-inflation is more rampant. In the East, where interdependence, harmony, and belonging are valued, modesty prevails.

Now an analysis of data gathered from 1,625 people in 15 culturally diverse countries finds a stronger predictor of self-enhancement: economic inequality.

“We don’t know the precise mechanism, but it seems unlikely that it is primarily an East-West difference,” says University of Kent research associate Steve Loughnan. “It’s got to do with how your society distributes its resources.” The study—whose 19 collaborators represent 16 universities around the globe—will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

The study’s participants, university students, were asked to rate themselves from 1 to 7 on various personality traits—how much of it they possessed compared with the average student; and how desirable the trait was.  Four versions of the questionnaire listed different traits from among 80; the traits related to agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, open-mindedness, and emotionality. The analytic design adjusted for differing cultural values.

The researchers looked at the correlations between evidence of self-enhancement and the individualism or collectivism of a country, its “power distance”—the preference for an autocratic hierarchy versus relative equality of power—and its level of economic inequality.

What they found: Virtually everywhere, people rate themselves above average. But the more economically unequal the country, the greater was its participants’ self-enhancement.

Why is this so? This study doesn’t say. But other research suggests that competition, especially in winner-take-all situations, makes standing out important and this undermines modesty and encourages its opposite. That’s what happens in “highly polarized economies, where wealth at the top is gross and deprivation at the bottom is stark,” says Loughnan. But the effect can be evinced experimentally even in egalitarian, self-effacing cultures, like Japan. On the other hand, where resources are equally distributed, self-deprecation and blending in are more valued.

Loughnan says the study is important for “many domains of psychology.” Until recently psychologists have focused on individual factors affecting wellbeing, such as education or family. But this research shows that “macro-social” factors also matter. “We live inside societies that have certain political and economic realities.  These affect how we think about the self and how happy we are.”

Economic policymakers should also take note. “We’re living through a time of considerable economic reform in Western countries,” he says. “The nature of that reform will have a big impact on people’s personal and social wellbeing.” Reform, then, “is not just about making the society richer, but how you distribute those riches.”

o

Economic Inequality Is Linked To Biased Self-Perception

Rething Paid-Earned-Owned Media

Initiative report: rethinking paid, earned & owned (media)

View more documents from J-P De Clerck

o

Rething Paid-Earned-Owned Media

More Seasons - More Cash For Retailers

o

More Seasons - More Cash For Retailers

Ambitious Goals = Satisfaction

RIVERSIDE, Calif. (www.ucr.edu) -- Consumers who set ambitious goals have a greater level of satisfaction compared to those who set conservative goals, according to a recently published paper by the Cecile K. Cho, a University of California, Riverside assistant marketing professor.

Cho and her co-author and Gita Venkataramani Johar, a professor at Columbia University, set up two experiments to compare people who set ambitious goals to those who set conservative goals. They focused on situations in which goals were achieved, and measured the level of satisfaction with the achieved goals.

“The moral of the story is don’t sell yourself short,” Cho said. “Aim high.”

The paper, “Attaining Satisfaction,” has been published online in the Journal of Consumer Research. It will appear in the December issue of the journal.

The paper aimed to answer whether lowering expectations helps manage happiness. The question was answered through two experiments.

In the first one, 134 participants were asked to set a target rate of return that they would be satisfied with and asked to pick from a percentage range of 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18 or 20. Low goal setters were defined as those who set the rate at 14 percent of lower. High goal setters were those who set the rate at greater than 14 percent.

Participants were then asked to allocate their $5,400 budget by picking three of 20 fictitious stocks presented to them.

After a 10-minute filler task, participants received the return of their stock portfolio, handwritten by the experimenter so it matched their goal. Participants were led to believe their stock allocation had been entered into a database to get actual returns.

The experimenters then concocted three feedback scenarios.

In the first one, only the stock performance information was provided. This is called the “default” condition of interest. In the second one, the participants were first told the typical return of stocks was 6 percent to 20 percent and then told how their stocks performed. In the last scenario, participants were first reminded what their goal was and then told how their stocks performed. Participants were then asked to rate their satisfaction on 9-point scales.

Of interest is whether all participants, who achieve their goals, are similarly happy. Existing research would predict that those who achieve their goals should be satisfied. Results suggested otherwise.

In the first “default” scenario, high goal setters average satisfaction was 7.85 while low goal setters were at 6.53.

In the third scenario, where the range of possible outcomes was reiterated, a similarly large gap occurred between high-goal setters (8.57) and low goal setters (6.98).

In the second scenario, where participants were reminded of their goal, the gap in happiness level between the two groups disappeared, with high goal setters at 7.72 and low goal setters at 7.46.

This suggested that when people set goals, they don’t necessarily recall this goal to evaluate their performance, but recruit a higher comparison point to do so. This upward comparison process likely negatively impacts their satisfaction with the performance of their portfolio.

A second experiment involving puzzles found similar results.

The paper is one of several about happiness and goals written or planned to be written by Cho, whose research focuses on consumer motivation and satisfaction.o

Ambitious Goals = Satisfaction

Consumers willing to pay for sustainable clothing

COLUMBIA, Mo. – The public often views the apparel industry as lacking transparency, sustainability and ethical practices. Scandals like child labor, sweat shops, and environmentally damaging manufacturing methods have alienated many consumers from the industry. Now, University of Missouri researchers have found that consumers are willing to support apparel companies that employ sustainable and ethical practices; but those businesses have to prove it.

Gargi Bhaduri, a doctoral student, and Jung Ha-Brookshire, an assistant professor of textile and apparel management in the College of Human Environmental Sciences at the University of Missouri, surveyed apparel consumers to find out if they were willing to pay a premium for products produced using sustainable and ethical methods. She found that consumers would be willing to pay 15 to 20 percent more for such products. However, she also found that consumers are likely to remain skeptical about apparel companies’ claims of transparency and sustainability.

“While consumers seem willing to support businesses that do practice sustainability and ethics, general distrust in the transparency of all apparel businesses tend to keep consumers from spending money on those businesses with sustainable practices,” Bhaduri said. “To solve this issue, consumers seem to demand a universal standard authorizing agency to verify the claims of the businesses with transparent practices.”

Bhaduri and Ha-Brookshire found that consumer skepticism of corporate transparency stems from the suspicion that sustainability claims are falsified or exaggerated by apparel companies as marketing ploys. Their study suggests that consumers feel the need for authentication of these businesses’ claims from one standardized and objective authority, like the government, whom they can trust.

“The apparel industry is one of the most globalized modern industries,” Bhaduri said. “Multiple countries are involved in manufacturing a single garment, making it almost impossible for consumers to know all the suppliers involved in apparel manufacturing. Because of this, if a business wants to establish a relationship of trust with consumers, it is up to the business to supply finished goods with visible and accessible information concerning the global manufacturing processes.”

Bhaduri and Ha-Brookshire also found that consumers want information regarding product sustainability to be available conveniently. They suggests the use of such as hangtags, care labels, and point-of-purchase tags with clear information about their sustainable business practices so consumers can make an educated purchase decision.o

Consumers willing to pay for sustainable clothing

Decision Making Changes With Age – and Age Helps!

We make decisions all our lives—so you’d think we’d get better and better at it. Yet research has shown that younger adults are better decision makers than older ones. Some Texas psychologists, puzzled by these findings, suspected the experiments were biased toward younger brains.

So, rather than testing the ability to make decisions one at a time without regard to past or future, as earlier research did, these psychologists designed a model requiring participants to evaluate each result in order to strategize the next choice, more like decision making in the real world.

The results: The older decision makers trounced their juniors. The findings will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

“We found that older adults are better at evaluating the immediate and delayed benefits of each option they choose from. They are better at creating strategies in response to the environment,” says Darrell Worthy, of Texas A&M University, who conducted the study with Marissa Gorlick, Jennifer Pacheco, David Schnyer, and Todd Maddox, all at the University of Texas at Austin.

In the first experiment, groups of older (ages 60 to early 80s) and younger (college-age) adults received points each time they chose from one of four options and tried to maximize the points they earned.  In this portion, the younger adults were more efficient at selecting the options that yielded more points.

In the second experiment—the setup was a sham test of two “oxygen accumulators” on Mars—the rewards received depended on the choices made previously.  The “decreasing option” gave a larger number of points on each trial, but caused rewards on future trials to be lower. The “increasing option” gave a smaller reward on each trial but caused rewards on future trials to increase.  In one version of the test, the increasing option led to more points earned over the course of the experiment; in another, chasing the increasing option couldn’t make up for the points that could be accrued grabbing the bigger bite on each trial.

The older adults did better on every permutation.

“The younger adults were better when only the immediate rewards needed to be considered,” says Worthy. “But the second experiment required developing a theory about how rewards in the environment were structured. The more experience you have in this, the better you are better at it.”

The psychologists conjecture that these results are related to the ways we use our brains as we age. Younger people’s choice making relies on the ventral striatum, which is related to habitual, reflexive learning and immediate rewards: impulsivity. But as this portion of the brain declines, older adults compensate by using their pre-frontal cortices, where more rational, deliberative thinking is controlled.

“More broadly, our findings suggest that older adults have learned a number of heuristics”—reasoning methods—“from their vast decision-making experience,” says Worthy. Another word for this, which the psychologists use in their title, is wisdom. For older people, it may be nice to know that this sometimes-undervalued asset has been ratified in the lab.

o

Decision Making Changes With Age – and Age Helps!

Idea Economy

PSFK CONFERENCE NYC 2011: Justin Gignac from Piers Fawkes on Vimeo.o

Idea Economy

Brand-conscious consumers take bad news to heart

 Consumers with close ties to a brand respond to negative information about the beloved brand as they do to personal failure – they experience it as a threat to their self-image, according to a new study by a University of Illinois marketing expert.

Tiffany Barnett White, a professor of business administration, says consumers with a high self-brand connection maintained favorable brand evaluations even when presented with negative brand information, suggesting that the reluctance of brand-conscious consumers to lower their opinion of a brand might be driven more by a motivation to protect the self.

“When companies get consumers motivated about their products, they are just as motivated to protect the brand as they are themselves,” White said. “So it’s really more about the self than the brand. When people can self-affirm through other means and activities, they’re not defensive at all.”

According to the study, co-written by Shirley Y.Y. Cheng, of the Hong Kong Baptist University, and Lan Nguyen Chaplin, of the Villanova School of Business, brands become highly symbolic of a consumers’ self-concept, so much so that consumers will defend their self-connected brands much as they would defend themselves from personal failure.

“Consumers are highly resistant to brand failure to the point that they’re willing to rewrite history,” said White, the Bruce and Anne Strohm Faculty Fellow at Illinois. “It not only explains why so many Toyota customers ignored the negative brand information in the aftermath of the highly publicized recalls, it also accounts for why they’re quick to defend the company and why they would want to re-write history in a more positive way.”

White says the research is scalable to brands in different industries.

“It’s not just Coke versus Pepsi, Toyota versus Honda, or Apple versus Microsoft,” she said. “Self-brand connections can extend into multiple markets. People may even think, ‘I don’t have any self-brand connections.’ Well, pretty much everyone does. It turns out that these self-brand connections are rather ubiquitous.”

It can even extend to preferences for professional sports teams, although you don’t have to be rabid Chicago Bears or Pittsburgh Steelers fan for those effects to register.

“In some cases, it can actually be a pretty subtle connection,” White said.

And even when teams muddle through losing seasons (or in the case of Chicago Cubs fans, 100-plus years of losing seasons), the effects still hold.

“People are always motivated to have a positive self-evaluation,” White said. “They want to think of themselves positively, and they want others to think positively of them. So when the Cubs are a mess, fans think of other ways to bolster their self-concept as Cubs fans. They talk about what a great ballpark Wrigley Field is during the summer. For highly connected fans, they’re re-painting the picture of their love affair with the Cubs brand. Otherwise, it’s not just that the Cubs have failed. It’s that they, as fans, have also failed.”

White cautions that brand-conscious consumers do have their limits. An Apple aficionado, for example, might be turned off by the squalid working conditions of the factories

in China that churn out iPhones and iPads.

“That could actually sever a consumer’s sense of self-brand connection,” White said. “They could say, ‘Look, if that’s what they’re about, then that’s not something I want to be a part of.’ ”

According to White, the big lesson for businesses is that the consumer is “really watching your brand, so your performance as a brand matters,” she said.

“Brand failure is not something that just impacts your bottom line. It also influences the consumers who have become attached to it. So that really points to getting consumers involved and invested with brands. Ultimately, they become almost co-partners. It’s another positive benefit of brand loyalty, and even another way to think about brand loyalty.”

o

Brand-conscious consumers take bad news to heart

Future Retail

Future Retail 2011

View more presentations from Tomorrow Design

o

Future Retail

From Retail to Metail

Accenture retail metailing

View more documents from serve4impact

o

From Retail to Metail

Social Acceptance and Rejection: The Sweet and the Bitter

For proof that rejection, exclusion, and acceptance are central to our lives, look no farther than the living room, says Nathan Dewall, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky. “If you turn on the television set, and watch any reality TV program, most of them are about rejection and acceptance,” he says. The reason, DeWall says, is that acceptance—in romantic relationships, from friends, even from strangers—is absolutely fundamental to humans.

In a new paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, DeWall and coauthor Brad J. Bushman of Ohio State University review recent psychological research on social acceptance and rejection. “Although psychologists have been interested in close relationships and what happens when those relationships go awry for a very long time, it’s only been about 15 yrs that psychologists have been doing this work on exclusion and rejection,” DeWall says. The results have highlighted how central acceptance is to our lives.

DeWall thinks belonging to a group was probably helpful to our ancestors. We have weak claws, little fur, and long childhoods; living in a group helped early humans survive harsh environments. Because of that, being part of a group still helps people feel safe and protected, even when walls and clothing have made it easier for one man to be an island entire of himself.

But acceptance has an evil twin: rejection. Being rejected is bad for your health. “People who feel isolated and lonely and excluded tend to have poor physical health,” DeWall says. They don’t sleep well, their immune systems sputter, and they even tend to die sooner than people who are surrounded by others who care about them.

Being excluded is also associated with poor mental health, and exclusion and mental health problems can join together in a destructive loop. People with depression may face exclusion more often because of the symptoms of their disorder—and being rejected makes them more depressed, DeWall says. People with social anxiety navigate their world constantly worried about being socially rejected. A feeling of exclusion can also contribute to suicide.

Exclusion isn’t just a problem for the person who suffers it, either; it can disrupt society at large, DeWall says. People who have been excluded often lash out against others. In experiments, they give people much more hot sauce than they can stand, blast strangers with intense noise, and give destructive evaluations of prospective job candidates. Rejection can even contribute to violence. An analysis of 15 school shooters found that all but two had been socially rejected.

It’s important to know how to cope with rejection. First of all, “We should assume that everyone is going to experience rejection on a semi-regular basis throughout their life,” DeWall says. It’s impossible to go through your entire life with everyone being nice to you all the time. When you are rejected or excluded, he says, the best way to deal with it is to seek out other sources of friendship or acceptance. “A lot of times, people keep these things to themselves because they’re embarrassed or they don’t think it’s that big of a deal,” he says. But our bodies respond to rejection like they do to physical pain; the pain should be taken seriously, and it’s fine to seek out support. “When people feel lonely, or when people feel excluded or rejected, these are things they can talk about,” he says.

o

Social Acceptance and Rejection: The Sweet and the Bitter

Wikipedia Gender Issue

Computer science researchers in the University of Minnesota's College of Science and Engineering are leading a team that has confirmed a substantial gender gap among editors of Wikipedia and a corresponding gender-oriented disparity in the content. Their research showed that only 16 percent of new editors joining Wikipedia during 2009 identified themselves as female, and those females made only 9 percent of the edits by the editors who joined in 2009.

o

Wikipedia Gender Issue

Relaxed Customers Buy 10 % More

According to a new article in Journal of Marketing Research:


"Relaxed consumers think products are worth more than less–relaxed consumers because relaxed individuals tend to think about the value of products at a more abstract level. For example, when bidding for the camera, relaxed participants focused more on what the camera would enable them to do (e.g., collect memories) and how desirable and advantageous it was to own it, whereas the less–relaxed participants focused more on the concrete features of the camera itself (e.g., the number of megapixels it had, the shutter speed)."


Download the article by clicking here.

o

Relaxed Customers Buy 10 % More

Study reveals how the quality of a good and the assortment of choices available influences consumers

A forthcoming paper in the American Marketing Association’s Journal of Marketing Research by Professor Sheena Iyengar, S.T. Lee Professor of Business, Management; Marco Bertini, Assistant Professor of Marketing at London Business School; and Luc Wathieu, Associate Professor at McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University, provides evidence on the impact of the size and quality of an assortment has on a consumer when they make purchasing decisions. When consumers are confronted with a proliferation of options, they will sharpen their appreciation of quality, and a switch to superior products will become more enticing. Subsequently, a switch to inferior products will become less tolerable. The research was inspired by the phenomenon that for many upscale goods, such as wine, while variety available to consumers has increased, prices have also increased – contrary to economic models that find competition leads to lower prices. This is the first paper to illustrate the effect of choice and quality on a consumer’s willingness to pay.
The researchers conducted three controlled experiments and observed one natural experiment to come to their findings. In one of the controlled experiments, two different groups of participants were shown displays of different dark chocolates. The researchers distorted a single factor, assortment density, in this study. One group saw a selection of 21 chocolates, the other just five. Participants were told that the chocolates were ordered from left to right according to their "premium rating" used in the industry to gauge quality. A small label indicating the name and rating accompanied each piece. Consumers were asked what they were willing to pay for one of the chocolates, and on a scale of 1 to 7, how much they agreed with the statement: "Buying good quality is always important, but it is particularly important when it comes to chocolate."
The researchers found that participants offered the greater choice set were prepared to pay 40 percent more for high-quality chocolate than their counterparts who bid on the same piece in the sparse assortment. Those presented with more choices also reported higher scores on the importance of quality in their purchase decision. Further, the group with 21 choices offered to pay 33 percent less for a low-quality chocolate than the group with five choices. The researchers conducted an additional experiment with wine to rule out the possibility that the relationship between density and willingness to pay was caused by different perceptions of the range of qualities offered or by a simple demand effect. Consistent with the outcome of the first study, participants presented with 27 alternatives were prepared to spend significantly less on a Sauvignon Blanc picked from the cheapest price tier than their counterparts presented with 9 alternatives. The same group of participants, however, were prepared to spend significantly more on a Sauvignon Blanc picked from the average price tier.
Sheena Iyengar explains the significance of the study’s findings. “When the product is desirable instead of functional, consumers flooded with a range of choices will focus on quality, and not price. The choice set size should not be dictating what you are willing to pay, and yet it does. To avoid paying more just because the assortment is large, think about what it is you're going to be using the product for, and then decide what is more important – quality or price – in that specific case.”
The researchers found supporting evidence of this conclusion in the field through the auction market. They examined 63 wine auctions conducted by a leading global auctioneer in London between January 2006 and June 2009. Multiple wine bottles were auctioned off at each event, although the exact number varied from event to event. The researchers found that at events with a denser assortment of wine, people paid more for the bottles with high appraisals and less for the ones with lower appraisals. Furthermore, participants started bidding more for the high-end wines and offering lower prices for lesser vintages when a catalog contained 40 or more different price categories.

o

Study reveals how the quality of a good and the assortment of choices available influences consumers

The Screens From Minority Report Are Here

o

The Screens From Minority Report Are Here

Why Do Consumers Think Hard-to-Get Babes and Products Are Worth the Extra Effort?

Potential dates who are slightly elusive or products that are stuck on the back of a shelf are more attractive to consumers than their more attainable counterparts, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

“To get the best outcomes or products, people usually have to expend effort,” write authors Sarah Kim and Aparna A. Labroo (both University of Chicago). “This relationship between effort and value is so closely associated in a consumer‟s mind that wanting the best outcomes automatically results in increased preference for any outcome associated with effort, even pointless effort.”

In one study, the authors had heterosexual males classify themselves as either “shy gawkers” or “smooth talkers.” Participants were presented with a picture of a potential date that was either clear or blurred slightly (by 15 percent). “The shy gawkers behaved as one might expect, evaluating the date more favorably when they viewed the clear rather than the blurry picture,” the authors write. “Quite surprisingly, however, the smooth talkers found the date more attractive when the picture was slightly blurry rather than clear.”

The authors found similar results with participants who classified themselves as “smart shoppers.” They indicated higher preferences for products when they had to travel across town to get them, even when they were available in a nearby store. They also preferred products that appeared to be pushed back on the shelves.

The authors even found that people who thought of themselves as “pioneers” rather than “followers” made more donations to a charity box when they had to stretch slightly (four feet) to make a contribution.

Luckily, when the researchers directed people‟s attention to the pointless nature of their efforts, they no longer valued the outcomes associated with the pointless effort. “So the next time you find yourself chasing that hottie, or you find yourself reaching to get a product way back on a shelf, pause for a moment and consider whether the outcome is really worth your effort,” the authors conclude.

o

Why Do Consumers Think Hard-to-Get Babes and Products Are Worth the Extra Effort?

Why Do Consumers Think Hard-to-Get Babes and Products Are Worth the Extra Effort?

Potential dates who are slightly elusive or products that are stuck on the back of a shelf are more attractive to consumers than their more attainable counterparts, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

“To get the best outcomes or products, people usually have to expend effort,” write authors Sarah Kim and Aparna A. Labroo (both University of Chicago). “This relationship between effort and value is so closely associated in a consumer‟s mind that wanting the best outcomes automatically results in increased preference for any outcome associated with effort, even pointless effort.”

In one study, the authors had heterosexual males classify themselves as either “shy gawkers” or “smooth talkers.” Participants were presented with a picture of a potential date that was either clear or blurred slightly (by 15 percent). “The shy gawkers behaved as one might expect, evaluating the date more favorably when they viewed the clear rather than the blurry picture,” the authors write. “Quite surprisingly, however, the smooth talkers found the date more attractive when the picture was slightly blurry rather than clear.”

The authors found similar results with participants who classified themselves as “smart shoppers.” They indicated higher preferences for products when they had to travel across town to get them, even when they were available in a nearby store. They also preferred products that appeared to be pushed back on the shelves.

The authors even found that people who thought of themselves as “pioneers” rather than “followers” made more donations to a charity box when they had to stretch slightly (four feet) to make a contribution.

Luckily, when the researchers directed people‟s attention to the pointless nature of their efforts, they no longer valued the outcomes associated with the pointless effort. “So the next time you find yourself chasing that hottie, or you find yourself reaching to get a product way back on a shelf, pause for a moment and consider whether the outcome is really worth your effort,” the authors conclude.

o

Why Do Consumers Think Hard-to-Get Babes and Products Are Worth the Extra Effort?

Consumer Self-Esteem While Shopping: Maybe Good-Looking Clerks Shouldn’t Wear the Store Brands?

People who don‟t feel positive about their appearance are less likely to buy an item they‟re trying on if they see a good-looking shopper or salesperson wearing the same thing, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

“Our work shows that consumers often focus on parallel consumption behaviors from others to inform their product decisions—i.e., people look to others in the store environment as an information source when shopping,” write authors Darren W. Dahl (University of British Columbia), Jennifer J. Argo (University of Alberta), and Andrea C. Morales (Arizona State University).

When a consumer with low body esteem tries on an article of clothing and sees an attractive person wearing the same thing, he or she is less likely to want the item. But for this phenomenon to occur, both parties needed to be wearing the item. In the study, the negative evaluations did not occur if the other shopper was merely carrying the item or if consumers didn‟t try on the item but saw someone else wearing it.

The authors demonstrate that consumer reactions to social information will differ depending on whether or not consumption behaviors are aligned. “For example, when a low body esteem consumer sees a dress on another consumer in the store but is not trying it on herself, she might think to herself, „That dress is really cute and stylish!‟ Similarly, if a low body esteem consumer tries on a dress in a store but does not see any other consumers wearing the same dress, she might think to herself, „This dress is really cute and stylish on me!‟ However, if she sees a dress on an attractive consumer in the store and is trying on the same dress herself, as she looks in the mirror she now thinks to herself, „That dress is really cute and stylish on me, but compared to her, I look terrible!‟”

Consumers who have low body esteem are more likely to be influenced by other shoppers than by salespeople, the authors found, but the researchers still question whether it‟s a good idea to require clerks to wear a brand‟s clothing.

Retailers should also take note when designing store layouts. “Specifically, stores would be advised to ensure that shoppers are not required to leave private dressing rooms to stand in front of a publicly shared mirror,” the authors write.

o

Consumer Self-Esteem While Shopping: Maybe Good-Looking Clerks Shouldn’t Wear the Store Brands?

New Study Says It’s Time to Stop Assuming Buyers and Salespeople Are in “Relationships”

Professional buyers don‟t really buy that they‟re in “relationships” with salespeople—at least not the kind of relationship that people share with family, friends, or a romantic partner, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research.

“Scholars explore how companies can inspire customers to love their brands and emotionally bond in their business relationships,” write authors Christopher Blocker (Baylor University), Mark Houston (Texas Christian University), and Dan Flint (University of Tennessee). “Are buyers‟ experiences with suppliers best conceived using a metaphor sourced from theory that explains family, friend, and romantic relationships?”

Modern marketing strategies tend to rely on “relationship marketing,” which assumes that sellers can develop bonds with buyers. This school of thought often draws upon theories from sociology and social psychology that explain close personal ties, like marriage, friendship, and parent-child relationships.

“But in these theories of human relationships, an authentic relationship is an end unto itself, love is voluntary and given freely, whether or not it is returned,” the authors write. “Are there limits to whether an authentic relationship can be used to explain business transactions where the buyer and seller are both employees of their respective firms, with profit-and-loss responsibilities and motives?”

The authors conducted in-depth interviews with 38 business buyers and found that their “relationships” with suppliers differed in important ways from personal relationships. “Buyers speak in-depth about going through the normal „script‟ of trying to behave as if seller interactions are „real‟ relationships, and sustaining this activity as a „polite fiction‟ to help them accomplish personal and corporate goals,” the authors explain.

The authors found that buyers prefer to connect (and disconnect) with suppliers as needs arise and hold low expectations for future interactions with salespeople outside of their business dealings. “This study suggests that business buyers are not actually seeking authentic relationships, and sellers‟ efforts to develop them may even create negative tension for buyers.”

o

New Study Says It’s Time to Stop Assuming Buyers and Salespeople Are in “Relationships”

Pulling a Fast One: How Do Consumers React to Zippy Disclaimers?

Consumers react negatively to most quick disclaimers at the end of ads, according to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research. But if the fast disclaimer comes from a trusted company, they‟ll let it slide.

“We suggest that fast disclaimers can give consumers the impression that the advertisement is trying to conceal information, „pulling a fast one‟ toward the goal of boosting purchase intention,” write authors Kenneth C. Herbst (Wake Forest University), Eli J. Finkel (Northwestern University), David Allan (Saint Joseph‟s University), and Gráinne M. Fitzsimons (Duke University). At first glance, it may seem preferable to zoom through those nasty side effects, saving precious advertising moments for the positive aspects of a product and glossing over undesirable information. But the authors found this strategy can backfire, except for the most trusted brands.

In a series of experiments the authors found that fast disclaimers undermine consumers‟ purchase intentions for unknown or distrusted brands. “Advertisers frequently only have 30 seconds to convey their message, and regulatory agencies sometimes require that the advertisement include a disclaimer,” the authors write. “Our findings suggest that advertisers promoting unfamiliar or not-trusted brands may want to conclude advertisements with normal-paced disclaimers, whereas advertisers promoting trusted brands can afford to save additional seconds for the advertisement‟s primary message by using fast disclaimers,” the authors write.

The authors believe their findings may reveal some bias in the system of regulating advertisements and requiring disclaimers. “Any policies that regulate disclaimer content but not disclaimer speed could infuse systematic bias favoring some companies over others,” the authors explain. “Such policies would allow companies whom consumers already trust to pack the required disclaimer content into just a few seconds without undermining consumers‟ trust and purchase intention, whereas these policies would end up forcing companies whom consumers either distrust or do not know to devote more time to this required content, presenting it at a slower speed.”

o

Pulling a Fast One: How Do Consumers React to Zippy Disclaimers?

Growing while Cutting Costs

Slashing prices was an essential tool to help companies survive the recession. But as growth comes back onto the agenda, a more integrated approach that balances cost and price according to market segment is going to be needed in the quest for high performance. New Accenture research explores the issues and points to areas of improvement. Download the paper by clicking here.o

Growing while Cutting Costs

On Motivation

Motivation - A story

View more presentations from Rob van Alphen

o

On Motivation

Social Class as Culture

Social class is more than just how much money you have. It’s also the clothes you wear, the music you like, the school you go to—and has a strong influence on how you interact with others, according to the authors of a new article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. People from lower classes have fundamentally different ways of thinking about the world than people in upper classes—a fact that should figure into debates on public policy, according to the authors.

“Americans, although this is shifting a bit, kind of think class is irrelevant,” says Dacher Keltner of the University of California-Berkeley, who cowrote the article with Michael W. Kraus of UC-San Francisco and Paul K. Piff of UC-Berkeley. “I think our studies are saying the opposite: This is a profound part of who we are.”

People who come from a lower-class background have to depend more on other people. “If you don’t have resources and education, you really adapt to the environment, which is more threatening, by turning to other people,” Keltner says. “People who grow up in lower-class neighborhoods, as I did, will say,’ There’s always someone there who will take you somewhere, or watch your kid. You’ve just got to lean on people.’”

Wealthier people don’t have to rely on each other as much. This causes differences that show up in psychological studies. People from lower-class backgrounds are better at reading other people’s emotions. They’re more likely to act altruistically. “They give more and help more. If someone’s in need, they’ll respond,” Keltner says. When poor people see someone else suffering, they have a physiological response that is missing in people with more resources. “What I think is really interesting about that is, it kind of shows there’s all this strength to the lower class identity: greater empathy, more altruism, and finer attunement to other people,” he says. Of course, there are also costs to being lower-class. Health studies have found that lower-class people have more anxiety and depression and are less physically healthy.

Upper-class people are different, Keltner says. “What wealth and education and prestige and a higher station in life gives you is the freedom to focus on the self.” In psychology experiments, wealthier people don’t read other people’s emotions as well. They hoard resources and are less generous than they could be.

One implication of this, Keltner says, is that’s unreasonable to structure a society on the hope that rich people will help those less fortunate. “One clear policy implication is, the idea of nobless oblige or trickle-down economics, certain versions of it, is bull,” Keltner says. “Our data say you cannot rely on the wealthy to give back. The ‘thousand points of light’—this rise of compassion in the wealthy to fix all the problems of society—is improbable, psychologically.”

The ability to rise in class is the great promise of the American Dream. But studies have found that, as people rise in the classes, they become less empathetic. Studies have also found that as people rise in wealth, they become happier—but not as much as you’d expect. “I think one of the reasons why is the human psyche stops feeling the need to connect and be closer to others, and we know that’s one of the greatest sources of happiness science can study,” Keltner says.

o

Social Class as Culture

On Branding

PSFK CONFERENCE NYC 2011: Robbie Vitrano from Piers Fawkes on Vimeo.
o

On Branding

Why Are More QR-codes More Scannable Than Others

o

Why Are More QR-codes More Scannable Than Others

Social Gaming's Impact On Young Consumer Behavior

o

Social Gaming's Impact On Young Consumer Behavior

The Curious Case of Behavioral Backlash: Why Brands Produce Priming Effects and Slogans Produce Reverse Priming Effects

Read the research paper by clicking here.o

The Curious Case of Behavioral Backlash: Why Brands Produce Priming Effects and Slogans Produce Reverse Priming Effects

Augumented Reality for Mobile

o

Augumented Reality for Mobile

Getting to The Heart of The Appeal of Videogames

People spend 3 billion hours a week playing videogames but little is known scientifically about why they are actually fun in the first place.

The vast majority of research into videogames has concentrated on the possible harmful effects of playing videogames, ignoring the simple question of why people actually want to play them.

But new research led by scientists at the University of Essex sheds some light on the appeal of videogames and why millions of people around the world find playing them so much fun.

The study investigated the idea that many people enjoy playing videogames because it gives them the chance to “try on” characteristics which they would like to have as their ideal self.

The research is part of ongoing work by Dr Andy Przybylski, a visiting research fellow at Essex, into how videogames affect people by trying to understand what draws so many people to such a wide variety of games.

Due to be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, the research found that gaming was the ideal platform for people to “try on different hats” and take on a characteristic they would like to have.

“A game can be more fun when you get the chance to act and be like your ideal self,” explained Dr. Przybylski. “The attraction to playing videogames and what makes them fun is that it gives people the chance to think about a role they would ideally like to take and then get a chance to play that role.”

The research found that giving players the chance to adopt a new identity during the game and acting through that new identity – be it a different gender, hero, villain – made them feel better about themselves and less negative.

Looking at the players’ emotion after play as well their motivation to play, the study found the enjoyment element of the videogames seemed to be greater when there was the least overlap between someone’s actual self and their ideal self.

“When somebody wants to feel they are more outgoing and then plays with this personality it makes them feel better in themselves when they play,” explained Dr. Przybylski.

Working with co-author Dr. Netta Weinstein, also from Department of Psychology at Essex, and academics in Germany and the United States, Dr. Przybylski’s research involved hundreds of casual game players in the laboratory and studied nearly a thousand dedicated gamers who played everything from The Sims and Call of Duty to World of Warcraft. Players were asked how they felt after playing in relation to the attributes or characteristics of the persona they would ideally like to be.

Inspired by his games as a child with imaginative play, Dr. Przybylski was curious to see if the findings showed that games were used as a way of players escaping from themselves.

“However, I was heartened by the findings which showed that people were not running away from themselves but running towards their ideals. They are not escaping to nowhere they are escaping to somewhere.”

Watch this video for more information on Dr. Przybylski’s prior studies:

Story from Andrew Przybylski on Vimeo.o

Getting to The Heart of The Appeal of Videogames

Ignoring the Customers

Who's ignoring their customers?

View more documents from Conversocial

o

Ignoring the Customers

Future of PR

o

Future of PR

$29 for 70 Items or 70 Items for $29? How Presentation Order Affects Package Perceptions

Download the article by clicking here.o

$29 for 70 Items or 70 Items for $29? How Presentation Order Affects Package Perceptions

Future of Retail

PSFK Future Of Retail Report 2011 [Preview]

View more presentations from PSFK

o

Future of Retail