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12/31/2009
The speakers' slides are available through the links below.
11/23/2009
Do you know how could most of us encode the other people's face? Some researches have revealed that most of us encode people's face in a more holistic manner. Maybe you believe this. However, if I tell you that people's perceptual experience of wine is also respresented in a more holistic way, do you believe this?
Lewis et al. (2009) published a very interesting paper on wine recognition task. They found that after reading of the global letters rather than after reading the local letters from the Navon stimulis, the moderate drinker are more accurate to recognize the wine which they tasted before. They ascribed it as the outcome of changing information processing styles. After finishing recognizing several letters in the global level in Navon task, people' thinking styles are more holistic comparing with the people who are asked to recognize the letters in a local level. This type of shifting thinking more holistic make more efficient to recognize the encoded former represented target information (eg. The target wine tasted before the Navon task, which is encoded in a holistic way).The result is obtained from a simple two conditions study, and they didn't add a control group to make further comparison.
However, I think it's an interesting finding because it might supply some implications in marketing research. For example, according to the paper, it seems that for most of products or advertisements (if they are not so simple), we might also be more likely encode these information in a more holistic way during our learning phrase if those products or advertisements are new for us. Based on the finding of this paper, people who are more holistic should be more accurate to recognize the target product from a later choice set. Howbeit, it might not be true in some conditions. For instance, when people are driven by some specific goals to buy something, the analytic processing style should be more helpful for consumers to recognize the target product in a later choice set, since the specific shopping goal might also elicit the most salient attribute information from the encoded products or advertisements' information. The eliciting information procedure from encoded object causes that analytic thinking style is more suitable for the futher recongnition task.
It would be interesting to test if consumers could recognize the target product(They have seen in their learning stage) from the distracters ( Choice sets) more accurately after finishing a Navon task which designed to recognize the global letters (or "We" priming). We would further test that the possible shopping goal's influence on this performance, since analytic processing style(eg. Introducing by asking to recognize small letters in Navon task or "I" priming) could promote the performance of recognition in this goal condition.
Secondly, as peoples' performances of memory or recognition task correlated with how we encoded the target stimuli in our brain, could we get some applications on the length of advertisement? It seems that the long advertisements might activate people's holistic encoding style, since try to remember more information need holistic processing. On the other hand, short advertisement might activate peoples' analytic encoding style of information, since analytic processing is more efficient to remember or obtain more information for short ad. So I argue that people who owned holistic thinking styles will have better memory or recognition performance of target product if the advertisement is long (eg. 1 minute ad) in their learning stage. While, for the people who are more analytic, their memory performance on the target product would be better if they saw the short advertisement (eg. 20 seconds ad) in their learning stage.
For more information about this paper, please check: here.
11/16/2009
Today I came across an interesting paper wrote by Mandel and Johnson (2002) about priming effect on consumers' choice in electronic shopping surrounding. Before went through this paper, for me, it seems that priming might be moderated obviously by related priming effect, since experts process information more deeply comparing with novices, who are more vulnerable to be influenced by external context information. However, this paper revealed that expertise is not always a nice moderator in consumers' choices, particularly these choices are influenced by the prior priming effect.
Although this paper is not so new, it supply us several nice hints to think about. Firstly, the main effect of this paper illustrate an nice example on feature priming, which demonstrate that the background color and pictures of website could affect consumers' further choices, namely consumers have increased preferences for products which have higher values on the primed attributes values. For example, people are more likely to choose economic products if the webpage's background is decorated with green color with pennies comparing with the people who are primed with red color and flames background which is seen as a safety priming. In contrast, people would like to choose products which have high value on safety attribute after they primed with the red color and flames background. Secondly, they found the expertise can't moderate the main priming effect. The similar main effect appears on both experts and novices. However, they also explored different behavior during the evaluation procedure among experts and novices. The novices spend more time to look at the prime-consistent attributes. For instance, if consumers are primed with green color with pennies, which is seen as price priming, they will spend more time to look at the price attribute comparing with the consumers primed with other cues. Interestingly, they also mentioned the control group people show a similar choices comparing with people who are primed with money. Unfortunately, they didn't report the attention behavior on control group. Howbeit, after observing the attention behavior, they found that this shifted searching behavior only occured in novices but not for the experts. So they argued that the similar priming effect on consumers' online choice might have different mechanisms between experts and novices. They ascribed factors causing experts' similar behavior to the internal memory search and inference in forming preference. They also point out that to further explore the underneath mechanisms of expertise is a possible research direction. So be careful when you go shopping online. It is not about you are an expert or not, you could also be driven by the feature priming effect.
In the end, I also just thought about something similar in the offline surrounding. It is quite obvious that consumers may have larger preference on cheap product when shopping if they saw the promotion poster before they entered into shop. It might also be true that you would more likely to choose a Chines product in the category from the shop after you had a chat with a Chinese guy, like me :) But it might not be true that expertise couldn't moderate this priming effect, since the priming feature (eg. Nationality) I discussed here is more complex comparing with the priming features( eg. Price, quality ) discussed by the author. We could find that some features, like nationality has more dimensions(eg. many countries in thw world) than the simple features which have two dimensions (eg. Price is either high or low. Quality is good or bad). I suspect that when the feature dimension is high, consumers' choice by prior feature priming might be moderate by expertise, as too complex feature might lead novices deliberate the feature more deeply, and sometimes the deliberation procedure could add in extra bias towards the salient feature, which might cause the backfire effect. However, the expertized people could be more likely to use their abundant knowledge and skilled inference to conquer the possible generated bias. In a word, I still think expertise could moderate the priming effect, but it depends on the complexity of priming features.
The detail of this paper could be found here :) 10/18/2009All of us know the construal level theory, and this theory is widely used in the research of consumer behavior. However, less research has further investigated the influence of more than one dimension (eg. Time, social, spacial etc.) psychological distance's effect either in psychology or consumer behavior's domain. I came across one paper which further exploited the possibilities. Kim et al (2008, paper could check from : http://ideas.repec.org/a/ucp/jconrs/v35y2008i4p706-713.html) found that when event on all the dimension was proximal, people would like to construe the event at low(Concrete) level. However, if event on one of the adding dimension was distant or all the dimensions were distant, people's construal on the event would stay on the high(abstract) level. They further found these type's of construal (temporal and social distance) having further effect on consumers' evaluation on product. One of the nice example is that consumers might have higher evaluations of a product that is negative on primary features(eg. lotion's absorbability) but positive on secondary features (eg. lotion's packaging) than that one which is positive on primary features but negative on secondary features(eg. when the related psychological distance dimensions are proximal), since Trop and Liberman (2003, check here: http://www.psych.nyu.edu/trope/Trope%20&%20Liberman%20%282003%29%20Temporal%20Construal.pdf) aruged that high level construals are primary and core features of events, whereas low level contruals are secondary and surface features of events. Do you agree their argument?
But at least I think their argument could make a little bit further extension on Rim and Uleman's paper (2009) which is about spontaneous trait inference. Namely, when one of the multi-dimensions' distance or all multi-dimensions' distances are distant, people are more likely to make spontaneous trait inference from others' behaviors. 10/12/2009I think correspondence bias an interesting phenomena which is explored by Gilber et al (1995) in their paper. You can read and download the paper from this link: http://www.som.yale.edu/Faculty/keith.chen/negot.%20papers/GilbertMalone_CorrespBias95.pdf.
Imagine that you were in a bus, and you saw a guy stood up, and gave his seat to a pregnant lady. What's the thing in your mind? Most people will have an impression that the guy is really nice. The correspondence bias is the tendency to draw inferences about a persons' unique and enduring dispositions from behaviors rather than entirely explaining this behavior by other situation or environment factors.
Suppose that the behavior is not executed by others, but also happened on you. Will you also have the same impression on yourself？Researchers found that people replied to explain its own behavior on the situation cues rather than the self-characteristic, especially for some bad behavior. An nice example discussed this issue could be found in the website of Lesswrong. com. The example is narrated as follows:
When you see someone else kick a vending machine for no visible reason, you assume they are "an angry person". But when you yourself kick the vending machine, it's because the bus was late, the train was early, your report is overdue, and now the damned vending machine has eaten your lunch money for the second day in a row. Surely, you think to yourself, anyone would kick the vending machine, in that situation.
Therefore, it seems that people sometimes will spontaneously infer other people's trait. Rim, Uleman and Trope (2009, paper see: http://www.psych.nyu.edu/uleman/RimUlemanTrope09JESP.pdf) combined this effect in the context of construal level Theory. They argued that the high or abstract level construal could increase the tendency for perceivers to draw spontaneous trait inferences(STIs) from behavioral information about the behavior actors. Basing on their finding, it seems that people are more likely to ascribe others' behaviors to their personality rather than the situational reason when others construal level distance (eg, time, spacial, social situation) is far with us. It makes sense in our real life. For instance, we are more likely to infer the unfamiliar people's traits basing on one expressed behavior rather than those of our friends.
Very interestingly, they found that psychological distance induces high level construal and increases STIs could explain the cultural differences in STIs information. The STIs is more prevalent in Western culture (eg. European- Americans) than Eastern culture (eg. Eastern-Aisans).
I am also wondering if this Correspondence bias or STIs could be transplanted in the objects or market product. For example, I bought a mp3 player. If it is broken during the guarantee period, I will be more possibly to infer that the brand of mp3 is bad. However, if I heard one other people mentioned that her same brand mp3 which is broken (this event should happen on the case that my mp3 is not broken)
, I could infer that it's just an accident. Maybe she operated in a wrong way. In a word, I suspect that the STIs might be occurred in the opposite way comparing with observing the negative behavior of humans. When the construal is low level, people are more likely to infer the intrinsic trait of product's problem (eg. The quality) rather than the cause from situation (eg. The wrong operation ).
I should thank Luk for supplying related papers and a lot of ideas and suggestions on my project.
10/3/2009A very interesting experiment related to visual attention is did by Dave Munger, who is the co-founder and editor of cognitive daily. It might be interesting for the researchers who planed to do some experiments in visual attention. You can find the original link here: http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2009/10/casual_fridays_troxlers_not_fo.php.
For me, the interesting thing is I thought culture could be a nice moderator on this effect. Based on the finding from Nisbett (2004), this effect might be more faster and stronger for the persons whose attention are more focal, since the global attention will drive people's attention from the focal dot in center to surrounding (outer circle) or the relationship between center pot and outer ring.
However, I also think about how to adapt this effect with marketing research. What will be happened if we change the spot in center into a small car picture. Since spot is a object which is static without have attributes related to moving. On the other hand, car has more attributes and it is a moving object when it is pushed with energy activation. Laran et al (See the paper in JCR, sep, 2008) argued that the goal priming effects are context dependent. So what I want to argue here is that people's attention might be more focal when they are shown with a static object or when they are in a surrounding with static context object. Imagine that when you are in bookshop, I think your attention will be more focal when interesting objects are selected by your attention. On the other hand, if you are in a more motional surrounding or be shown with objects with motional attributes, your attention might become more global. Think about that when you are in a car exhibition, your attention might shift more global.
BTW, here focal attention means that if you select your attention on one object, you will put major attention on the selected object to make further analytic observation. The global attention is defined as that the attention is not only focused on your selected object, but your attention will also leave a door to the surrounding around the object, even to detect the relationship between the selected object and its surrounding.
Thus, in a word, I want to argue that consumers attention could be shifted either focal or more global, and it is depended on the context information.
Just some rough thinking from this weekend. Push wishes you have a nice Sunday. 9/4/2008
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"? 8/29/2008Leonard 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"... 7/29/2008
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? 7/16/2008Monica 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. |
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