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Marketing
~ Environmentally Friendly Marketing ~
by: Jonah Berger and Gráinne Fitzsimons
 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. |
