Marketing Manipulation

A Consumer's Survival Manual

Michael Kamins

• Publisher: WSPC
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9789813234727
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Marketing

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Marketing Manipulation deals with the tactics and strategies used by marketers that prey on human cognitive, social and memory based biases ultimately influencing consumer behavior in their favor.

Kamins focuses on examples from academic research where consumers have been found to be susceptible to bias and therefore have made less than optimal purchase decisions. Particularly, academic research in the area of Pricing, Product, Promotion, Sales and marketing research. Written in an accessible manner, this book puts the consumer (you!) in the center and aims to helps making all of us a better decision maker when confronted with a range of stimuli in a marketing environment.

--> Sample Chapter(s)
The Impact of the Marketing Environment --> Contents:

• The Impact of the Marketing Environment
• System I Processing
• Cognitive Biases and System II Processing
• Social Biases
• Memory Biases
• The Problem of Inertia
• Price and Its Influence Upon Choice
• Deceptive Products: Consumer Confusion, Secondary Meaning and Dilution
• Marketing Manipulation by the Drug Companies is Enough to Make You Sick!
• Selling Tactics That Have the Potential to Deceive
• Deceptive Advertising and Promotional Techniques
• Political Advertising and Deception
• Manipulative Marketing Research from Questionnaire Design to Results
• Winning Strategies for Online Purchases (eBay, Priceline and StubHub)
• Wrapping It All Up

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--> Readership: Undergraduates in Marketing and general readers interested in learning marketing terms and psychology studies behind marketing. -->
Marketing;Consumer Behaviour;Pricing;Product;Promotion;Distribution00

Chapter 1

The Impact of the Marketing Environment

Imagine that you are taking your weekly trip to the supermarket to buy groceries with your significant other, and as you pass by the cereal aisle, you reach for a box of Kelloggs’ Frosted Flakes and quickly place it into your shopping basket. Your significant other, whose main role in life seems to be to serve as the critic of what you eat and how you lead your life in general, tells you: “Get that stuff out of the shopping cart, first of all, it’s not good for you and secondly it’s for kids!” You counter her arguments by telling her that everyone who knows Tony The Tiger, the spokes-tiger for Frosted Flakes knows that they are GREATTTTTTTTT for you, taste good, and moreover as Kelloggs’ own advertising just recently suggested, are not ONLY just for kids, but for adults too, so there!

But is your choice of Kelloggs’ Frosted Flakes a decision as simple as merely tossing it into your shopping cart? Let’s back up just a bit and examine more deeply what influenced you to choose Frosted Flakes in the first place, and what factors contributed to your belief that it is “great” for you and great tasting to boot! A colleague of mine from Stony Brook University studied this very question and found out that the advertising characters that one is exposed to in childhood influence your brand evaluations when you become an adult.¹ So for those of you who had warm and fuzzy feelings when you were a kid about the Burger King, Ronald McDonald, Tropicana, Toucan Sam, Tony the Tiger, Chiquita Banana, Captain Crunch and the like, those feelings in many cases may have evolved into a deeper yet subconscious commitment to these icons and the brand they represent as you grew into adulthood. No, I am not insinuating that you had an affair with any of these characters, nor can I conclude that you obsess over them day and night. What I can conclude, however, is that the positive feelings you had toward these advertising characters when you were a kid are alive and well today when you are an adult and you may not even know it! The feelings that you hold toward these characters can potentially result in a preference for the brands that feature them, and ultimately an “enduring bias” toward the quality of the brands they represent. In the case of Frosted Flakes, this bias toward Tony the Tiger may reflect itself in the degree of nutritional health benefits that you believe the product conveys to you. In other words, if you liked Ronald McDonald as a child, the fries that you eat as an adult are perceived as healthier than other brands; if you liked Tony the Tiger as a child, then as an adult you are more likely to perceive the cereal as healthier than those not familiar with this 1950s icon.

It is easy to simply discount these findings about Tony as just a figment of the imagination of some mad academic researchers in an ivory tower with lots of student subjects, time on their hands and a computer to analyze the resulting data. But these findings spanned two countries and focused on actual consumers outside of the classroom. Indeed, the cynic might argue: “everyone knows these characters are just that — characters, they have no impact on me now, and had no impact on me then, why would anyone prefer a food just because it had an advertised character?” The answer comes from a study from Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity.² This research, using identical products (graham crackers, gummy fruit snacks and carrots), found that the packaging that contained a cartoon character as opposed to one that did not resulted in significantly more 4–6 year-old children preferring the snack with the cartoon character. But the findings do not stop there; the kids actually believed that the packaging with the cartoon character tasted better. So, the link between, the use of advertising characters and better taste starts at a young age, that is, this is probably as a result of extensive exposure to kids cartoon programming and advertisements with engaging characters hawking products to their young viewers.

This product preference can then travel across time, even decades, influencing us as an adult to prefer the same brand that we loved as a kid, only now, not only causing us to rationalize that our product preference tastes better than the competition, but even that it is more healthy for you. This led my colleague at Stony Brook to argue that parents today should take more care in checking the labels on the products they have loved and embraced since they were children because it is possible that affectionate feelings for brand characters that they carry from childhood can interfere with the relevant nutritional information on the box. It also suggests that each of us should more carefully examine our brand choices to make sure that childhood desires are not subconsciously leading us to choose unhealthy foods in the present for ourselves and for our children. That is, just because you were cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs as a child, does not mean that “Sonny the Cuckoo bird,” (yes, that’s his name) should have a shot at influencing your kids’ cereal choice.

By now you have probably heard enough of cartoon characters and brand symbols, and you have made a silent vow not to let them interfere with your product choice. So, armed with this newfound knowledge you go back into the supermarket and re-start your shopping trip. As you begin shopping, I implore you to begin paying attention to the background music being played. Once you do this, you may begin to wonder why the tempo and beat is so slow? You ask your significant other, but she says that she doesn’t pay attention to such things, she just shops. But as you reach the checkout, you realize that not only have you spent an inordinately longer time in the store than you typically would want to, but you seem to have bought more. This, while a surprise to you, is not a surprise to those researchers who examine environmental stimuli and their impact on the consumer. Indeed, there are many studies which have shown that slower music tempo in a shopping environment gets the consumer to walk slower, and when you walk slower you notice more things, and when you notice more things…guess what…you purchase more things.³ I guess a side benefit to this environmental manipulation, however, is that you are getting free dancing lessons in the supermarket as you subconsciously move to the beat of the music. Who knows maybe one day you can fulfill your secret dream of getting on the hit show, “Dancing with the Stars.”

So now you are avoiding brand characters and trying to walk quicker than the music that’s playing in the background so you are not influenced to buy items you didn’t plan on buying in the first place. All of a sudden, you notice that it’s cold and drafty in the supermarket, so you put on your extra sweater but still the tip of your nose has a certain chill. By putting on that extra layer of clothing you are engaging in a physical process called thermoregulation, defined as an attempt to keep our internal temperature within certain boundaries.⁴ However a set of researchers from my Alma Mater, Bernard M. Baruch College, claim that humans, aside from thermoregulating themselves on the physical dimension of warm–cold, also engage in a mental form of thermoregulation via decision-making styles.⁵ For example, someone who is referred to as a “Hot-Head” is an individual who defers to his/her emotions, whereas someone who is described as “cool and calculated” typically is seen as taking one’s time to think from an indepth carefully considered cognitive perspective. Is it possible that when an individual is feeling cold, that they may adopt a decision-making style that is emotional or warm in nature, and that when one is warm they may thermoregulate by adopting a more calculating (cool) and cognitive decision style? Hadi, Block, and King (2012) studied this phenomenon in a series of experiments designed to examine the cognitive approach consumers took to a decision choice involving the consumption of a relatively unhealthy rich chocolate cake versus a more calorie-deprived fruit salad for a snack. When subjects were previously asked to drink a hot liquid, (used to induce feelings of warmth), more than twice as many individuals chose the fruit salad as opposed to the chocolate cake. Moreover, when another group of subjects was asked to drink the iced drink first, the majority then chose the chocolate cake. What do these findings suggest? If one is feeling overly hot, then pursuing a cognitive decision approach which is perceived as cool should be utilized as a form of thermoregulation. Therefore, the more healthy fruit salad should be more decidedly chosen over the unhealthy chocolate cake in this condition, as it indeed was. Likewise, if one is cold, and warmth is needed to self-regulate via thermo-regulation, then the more emotive decision-making approach should be taken, and more individuals should chose the chocolate cake over the fruit salad, as was found.

For those doubting Thomases among you who think that this result is strange, consider the authors’ second experiment where the focus involved the dollar amount of insurance the owner would purchase for an antique clock. The clock was either described as having significant sentimental value or not. Subjects were again exposed to the hot/cold drinking manipulation discussed previously. After drinking the contents of the glass, subjects were then given the clock manipulation where either the sentimental value was expressed or it was not. Findings showed that consumers were willing to purchase generally higher amounts of insurance for the “sentimental” family heirloom clock, relative to the identical clock that was not described as such, but only when subjects had consumed the cold drink. But why?…because drinking the cold drink led to the need for mental thermoregulation, which manifested itself in affective or emotional (warm) thinking, as those participating in the experiment got in touch with their sentimental selves. These individuals felt the emotional need to insure the antique clock against loss when the sentimental value of the clock was highlighted by the experimenter.

This temperature effect on decision-making also was shown to be evident in a series of studies conducted in Israel led by a researcher from the Hebrew University.⁶ Tapping into prior research which shows that physical warmth leads to social warmth and appreciation of others,⁷ and that brands are often used as a device to reflect one’s own identity,⁸ the authors maintained that when the consumer is physically warm or even feeling hot, their willingness to pay for a variety of different products is significantly greater than when they are not feeling hot and bothered. For example, in one of their experiments, subjects were placed into a room where the ambient temperature was set at either 79° (warm) or 65° (cool). Next, participants were told that they would be presented with images of a number of products that were available for purchase. The results showed that participants in the warm room were willing to pay more for the products than those in the cooler room across 11 different product categories. The researchers claimed that the effect found was driven by the emotional warmth driven toward the product that the physical warmth had induced. So, if we value products more and are willing to pay higher prices for them when we are uncomfortably hot, those of you who late at night are sitting in a hot room at your computer trying to snipe on eBay, may be better served to put some ice cubes on your head, turn on the air conditioner, go to bed, and place your bids in the morning. You may find that the amount you wish to bid is lower, consistent with the temperature in the room.

But if physical warmth triggers emotional warmth toward others and toward the products we consume, does it also possibly influence those who we seek for advice when making key decisions? Research in decision-making with financial consequences makes the claim that consumers are disposed toward using others’ opinions as input into choice decisions when individuals are warm. That is, a tendency to “conform to the crowd” was evident in research recently conducted at a Hong Kong university, finding that when environmental conditions are warm, this increased the subjects’ perceptions of social closeness to other decision-makers, resulting in others’ opinions being given greater weight in decision-making.⁹ This research used none other than the racetrack to test this proposition. In this context, it was found that on days when the temperature at the track was warmer, there was a greater tendency for bettors to place bets on what is known as the “chalk” or, in simple parlance, the favorite horse. This is because betting on the favorite represents what is generally known to be the “wisdom of the crowd.” After all, that is why the horse is the favorite, because more people think that he/she will win the race! Justify’s Triple Crown win at Belmont occurred on a warm day where the temperature reached 83 degrees. Coupled with the fact that he was the sentimental favorite, many $2 win tickets were placed on him. If history follows a pattern (see American Pharoah), many of these tickets will never be cashed as pundits believe that they will be worth more on eBay later than presently at the track.

So, you say, I don’t go to the racetrack and I don’t use off-track betting, in fact I am NOT a gambler, so this segment of the book does not apply to me! Really? I’ll bet that many of us who do not consider themselves to be gamblers, are actively involved in “investing” in the stock market, which I have been told is the biggest gamble of all. So as you sit at home plugging away at your computer, making financial decisions regarding where to allocate the money you just placed in your 401 K, if you happen to do this task on a hot day, do you simply buy the stock that analysts all prefer? Or maybe you go into an air conditioned room and place your money on that penny biotech stock that someone told you could go to the moon, if it simply completes a Phase I, II and III trial and ultimately gets approved by the FDA. And if you are doing your tax return on a cold day or with the air conditioning blowing down hard on your back, do you finally decide to get “creative” with your tax return and shun the advice of your well-intended accountant? Clearly, the findings of this particular study extend well beyond the racetrack and should bring your attention to the fact that the air-conditioning works well in San Quentin, where socialization with other prisoners may not be a good idea!

So, now back to the story. Here we are, still in the supermarket, staying away from brand characters, paying attention not to dance to the beat of the background music that’s playing and now cognizant of the temperature inside the supermarket itself. So when you go to choose your favorite brand of spaghetti, you now wonder, is it truly my favorite brand, or is it the favorite brand of my significant other, and I chose it just because they have the heat on in the supermarket? In addition, am I feeling particularly amorous toward my significant other because I truly love her, or is it the heating system in the supermarket at work again or am I wearing thermal underwear? In any event, at this point the trip to the supermarket is getting more complicated than anyone can ever imagine. So, with the wind of the heating system blowing at your back, and the cash register ringing up your final purchase, you decide to take your significant other to the movies to relax, and it should shock no one that the choice is to see a romantic movie.

You arrive early at the box office, find a good seat, and sit down with your significant other with the sole intention of relaxing. But now, the price you pay for being early is that before the movie begins, you typically have to sit through 10 minutes of advertising and another 10 minutes of previews, for movies that you have absolutely no intention of seeing and products you have no intention of buying. So, you plan ahead and rush out to buy some popcorn as a diversionary tactic, and start to munch quietly through the advertising and through the previews. Interestingly, research shows that the act of munching on popcorn serves to disrupt the process of cognitive focus which typically involves one covertly and silently simulating the pronunciation of the more familiar words present in the advertisement (typically the brand name).¹⁰ If you doubt that we covertly and silently repeat words, just think about how you behave when reading a book. Is there anyone out there who can read without mouthing or repeating the words in their head?¹¹ This silent and covert simulation has been shown to underlie the famous “mere exposure” effect¹² where it was found that the more a stimulus is repeated the more it is liked. You all know this effect maybe not by its name, but certainly by its impact upon you. Simply go back in memory to when you were a kid and heard a song on the radio. The first time you heard it, it may have caught your ear (like Wrecking Ball, although the visuals there was where all of the action was). The second time you heard it, you liked it a little better, and when it became familiar and you could sing along, you liked it a lot. A recent study conducted in Germany found that munching on popcorn, or talking during previews, (something that is sure to get a shussssh from the person behind you), served to immunize the viewers from the impact of the advertising...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Series Editors
• Title
• Copy
• About the Author
• Contents
• Chapter 1. The Impact of the Marketing Environment
• Chapter 2. System I Processing
• Chapter 3. Cognitive Biases and System II Processing
• Chapter 4. Social Biases
• Chapter 5. Memory Biases
• Chapter 6. The Problem of Inertia
• Chapter 7. Price and Its Influence Upon Choice
• Chapter 8. Deceptive Products: Consumer Confusion, Secondary Meaning and Dilution
• Chapter 9. Marketing Manipulation by the Drug Companies is Enough to Make You Sick!
• Chapter 10. Selling Tactics That Have the Potential to Deceive
• Chapter 11. Deceptive Advertising and Promotional Techniques
• Chapter 12. Political Advertising and Deception
• Chapter 13. Manipulative Marketing Research from Questionnaire Design to Results
• Chapter 14. Winning Strategies for Online Purchases (eBay, Priceline and StubHub)
• Chapter 15. Wrapping It All Up
• Index