Jonah A. Berger and Gráinne Fitzsimons
Executive Summary
Every day, consumers are exposed to myriad cues in thesurrounding environment. They might see dogs if they live near a park, waves if they live near the beach, or dozens of orange pumpkins and decorations if it is late October around Halloween. These incidental cues are often given little attention and, on the surface, seem innocuous, but can these subtle cues actually influence the products consumers buy?
This article examines how subtle, everyday cues influence product evaluation and choice. The advertising industry is based on the notion that repeated exposure to a product leads to increased sales, but can similar effects emerge for products that are related to cues that were previously encountered? The more consumers see advertisements for Tide, the more they should like and purchase Tide, but what about exposure to stimuli related to Tide? If more consumers see waves on the beach (i.e., tides), will they like Tide more and purchase it more often?
The authors suggest that incidental exposure to indirectly related real-world cues can influence consumer behavior. Because related concepts are linked in memory (e.g., dogs–cats, waves–Tide, orange–Tide), exposure to one concept can activate or make more accessible related concepts. Consequently, just as a Tide advertisement might remind people to buy Tide, similar effects might occur for related product cues in everyday environments (e.g., waves).
The studies in this article support this perspective. The authors find that environmental cues can make related products more accessible. For example, around Halloween, when people should be more frequently exposed to the color orange, the authors find that orange-related products (e.g., Reese’s Pieces, orange soda) were more likely to come to mind for consumers. Similarly, consumers who were exposed to pictures of dogs recognized that Puma was a brand of sneakers faster than consumers who were not exposed to the pictures.
In addition, exposure to real-world environmental cues influenced product evaluation and choice. In one study, consumers were asked to make various product choices (e.g., Coke or Pepsi) while using either an orange or a green pen. Some of the choices also involved products that were related to orange (e.g., Tide) or green (e.g., Sprite). The authors find that merely using a different-colored pen was enough to influence product choice. People who wrote with an orange pen were more likely to select products related to orange, and people who wrote with a green pen were more likely to select products related to green. In another study, undergraduate students recorded what they ate over a two-week period. Some ate their meals in dining hall environments that contained a particular cue (dining hall trays), and others ate in environments that did not contain the cue. Halfway through that period, some of the students learned a slogan that created a link between trays in the dining hall and fruit and vegetable consumption. Thus, some of the participants should have been cued by their environment to remember to eat fruits and vegetables. As predicted, this cueing influenced choice. Consumers whose environments provided reminders to eat fruits and vegetables reported consuming more fruits and vegetables over the period. Exposure to environmental cues also influenced product evaluations. In one study, the authors examine the link between Puma (a brand related to cats) and exposure to related cues (images of dogs). Exposing consumers to more pictures of dogs (as part of an ostensibly unrelated task) led them to report higher evaluations of Puma sneakers.
Overall, the data illustrate that exposure to everyday cues in real-world environments can have an important impact on product evaluation and choice. Although marketers often want to design catchy product names and slogans, these results suggest that it is also important to pay attention to the surrounding environment. Linking products to prevalent environmental cues may help increase their success.
Biography
Jonah A. Berger received his doctoral degree in Marketing from Stanford University in 2007. He is currently Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Berger’s research examines consumer decision making, with the goal of understanding how individual decisions and social influence between people aggregate into macrolevel phenomena, such as social contagion and trends. Some of his recent work has focused on how social identity and cues in the environment influence how products, ideas, and behaviors catch on and become popular or die out and become abandoned.
Gráinne Fitzsimons received her doctoral degree in Social Psychology from New York University in 2004. She is currently the Canada Research Chair in Social Cognition in the Department of Psychology at the University of Waterloo, while on leave from the Marketing Group at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Fitzsimons’s research interests include most aspects of social cognition and self-regulation. Some of her current work examines the influence of brands on non–consumer behavior, how people balance multiple goals, and emotional responses to goal attainment.
Journal of Marketing Research, Vol. XLV, No. 1, February 2008
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