Marketers usually pay great attention to communicating the positives of a product but often less to reassuring consumers of the absence of the negatives. Yet the latter might be more important in how consumers make purchasing decisions.
When buying a product we might worry that it will disappoint or disturb us in some way. Uncomfortable itchy labels on the inside of t-shirts, food that goes off within 24 hrs of getting it home, the glass of lemonade at the beach-bar that turns out to be warm, the badly needed drain-cleaner that doesn’t work or the restaurant meal that gives you an upset stomach.
I recently had to buy some new carpet and the salesman told me an interesting story. While showing me different carpet samples from different suppliers, we came across two samples of what appeared to be identical carpets but priced slightly differently. I asked why, and he said that sometimes suppliers just charge different amounts for the same carpets. And he regularly has customers insist on paying for the more expensive option despite his assurance that it’s the same product. Their slight doubt that one might be inferior in quality was enough to override his reassurances.
No matter how promising a product may look, if we have an objection to it we might reject it. In fact, we would rather be more certain we are choosing something that satisfies us than risk that something might delight us but also might be disappointing. This decision-making strategy is known as satisficing.
This is probably one of the most important reasons why we are biased towards choosing known over unknown brands. They minimise the worry that the product’s effectiveness will let us down or even harm us in some way. Removing doubts about quality is often something we are ready to pay a premium for.
And yet, because satisficing is a non-conscious way of choosing, marketers often forget that this is how consumers choose, and place more focus on the attainment of various quality attributes. On the surface, it might appear that ensuring your product or service appears the best possible quality appears rational, but perhaps in market research we too often forget the lesson of satisficing: that there is probably more potential in reassuring that a product is very reliable at being ‘good enough’ than trying to convince consumers it is amazing.
But why do consumers decide in this way?
Loss aversion
In psychology it's long been believed that we are twice as motivated to avoid losses than we are to pursue gains. This concept was popularized by Kahneman and Tversky's influential 1979 paper(1), one of the most cited works in both economics and psychology.
The evolutionary explanation suggests that for our ancestors, losing food could mean death, while gaining extra food wasn't necessarily critical for survival. However, despite widespread acceptance in psychology and behavioral economics, recent research challenges loss aversion as a universal principle – sometimes we value gains as much as or more than losses.
For example, consider how people supposedly dislike giving up possessions more than they enjoy acquiring items of equal value. However, new experiments(2) suggest this behavior actually stems from a bias toward the status quo – a preference for inaction over action – rather than true loss aversion. In other words, what appears to be loss aversion may simply be our tendency to stick with what we know.
Yet there may be another reason why we use the satisficing strategy: we may be intuitively skeptical that a product can delight us.
What Rotten Tomatoes can teach us about quality
RottenTomatoes.com provides percentage ratings of movies that are calculated from aggregating whether reviewers are broadly positive or negative about it.
I’ve noticed a couple of things about it: firstly it surprises me how well it works. Despite the simplicity of this metric, it’s generally a reliable prediction of how enjoyable I will find a movie. It certainly is a good predictor of whether the movie will be disappointing. If a movie lacks pace, is boring, incoherent or just plain corny, I trust Rotten Tomatoes to pick up on that.
But at the higher end of movie quality it seems less sensitive. Some movies just get scores above 90% because they, in my opinion, avoid making any big mistakes. Yet they are attaining similar scores to all time classics that have changed the movie industry and have stood the test of time. They are incredibly non-bad but not necessarily amazingly good.
Perhaps this is indicative of a more general principle. At the upper levels of high quality it gets harder to appreciate and measure each additional advance. And this means that fewer people may even care. Maybe it is just easier to detect poor quality than it is to detect excellent quality. And maybe most of us care more about the former than the latter. It’s easier to systematise quality control than it is to agree on which ideas will provide exceptional levels of quality. And we therefore assume that brands are generally just unable to amaze us, but they are able to protect us from disappointment.
Implications
Are there any hidden negative associations with your product/service?
When we are working with our clients to test new creative ideas we typically recommend testing some negative attribute associations. In addition to the reasons outlined in this blog post we also find that response timings are often more sensitive at picking up the rejection of a negative than the acceptance of a positive (leading to more reliable measurements and insights)
When considering what to do about negative associations. it’s useful to ask oneself whether the reaction is an emotional one or a rational worry about quality or functional weaknesses. If, for example, there is something about the design of the packaging that might be off-putting, then design changes could help. But if consumers are worried about a product feature not working as well as they would like, a text claim on the pack or in advertising is typically the best way to reassure them. Are you providing consumers the reassurance they need to make a confident purchasing decision?
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