Executive Summary
Marketers often employ cues in advertising or packaging to signal the effectiveness of their products, presumably in the belief that they produce a positive impact on consumer demand. Prior research has suggested that these marketing cues may produce a beneficial effect on initial consumer preference at the purchase stage. However, the influence of signaling effectiveness on postpurchase consumption remains an uninvestigated question. In this article, the authors argue that signaling effectiveness is a double-edged sword; while effectiveness cues may increase initial purchase, they can curb postpurchase consumption.
Across four studies, the authors consistently demonstrate that salient marketing cues can increase perceived product effectiveness and reduce product usage. They show that this reduction in usage results from inference making and is moderated by cue salience and people’s need for cognition. The findings are robust across both hypothetical and actual consumption scenarios and across various product categories, including insect repellent, teeth-whitening rinse, and toilet bowler cleaner. The authors also empirically test the impact of signaling effectiveness on product choice and find that marketing cues highlighting effectiveness can (though not always) increase product choice.
The findings offer rich implications for practice. Brand managers often signal product effectiveness with salient marketing cues such as pictures and brand names in labeling and packaging, with the conviction that they produce a positive impact on sales. This research reveals that signaling effectiveness is a double-edged sword, which may potentially hurt long-term sales when the cues curb usage without proportionally stimulating choice. For example, the authors find that a brand name signaling environmental friendliness, “BalanceGreen,” increased its usage relative to a brand with a name leading to inferences of greater effectiveness, “BalanceClean,” yet it had an equivalent choice share. Alternatively, employing “neutral” marketing cues that do not directly promote effectiveness may be a viable strategy.
The authors also discuss solutions to the unfavorable impact of signaling effectiveness. While effectiveness perceptions play a prominent role in deciding product usage, it is among a variety of factors that determine product choice. Therefore, one solution is to employ cues that can stimulate purchase without enhancing effectiveness inferences. Alternatively, because the results suggest that effectiveness cues only decrease usage when they are salient in the consumption context, another possible solution is to add effectiveness cues in the purchase context and remove them in the consumption context. For example, companies can present effectiveness signals in advertisements or on the outer box of the product (e.g., using the picture of a smiling face with white teeth on the outside package of a toothpaste) to increase product choice but avoid presenting any salient effectiveness cues on the product itself (e.g., using only verbal descriptions on the toothpaste).
Biography
Meng Zhu is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Carey Business School, Johns Hopkins University. Her research interests broadly fall into the domain of consumer judgment and decision making, with a particular focus in the area of conservation and consumption. For example, her work investigates the behavioral determinants of waste in consumption as well as contextual factors that trigger conservation behavior, such as incidental resource cues, marketing cues, and color cues. In another steam of research, she examines the impact of the abundance psychology on the consumption of physical and mental resources.
Darron M. Billeter is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Brigham Young University. His research focuses on consumer decision making. More specifically, he investigates consumers’ adoption and use of products. His work has been published in Journal of Consumer Research and Journal of Marketing Research.
J. Jeffrey Inman joined the faculty of the Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh in 2000. Before that, he was on the faculties at the University of Wisconsin (1994–2000) and the University of Southern California (1991–1994). His research focuses on consumption behavior and consumer decision making. He is on the editorial boards of Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Marketing Science, Journal of Consumer Psychology, and Journal of Retailing. He is also an associate editor at Journal of Marketing Research and Journal of Marketing. His work has been published in Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Retailing, and California Management Review. He is president-elect of the Association for Consumer Research.
Journal of Marketing Research, Volume 49, Number 1, February 2012
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