Trust in the pack

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In a multi-media world, people are exposed to product claims, marketing messages and commercial information across numerous devices throughout their day. One study suggested that the average adult now sees about 360 ads a day across TV, radio, internet, newspapers and magazines.

Much has been written about making marketing stand out in a cluttered media environment – but what about the trust in the message? This is what Tatiana Fajardo, of the College of Business, Florida State University, and Claudia Townsend, of the School of Business Administration, University of Miami, set out to determine in their research.

Through a series of experiments, they explored whether a marketing claim placed on a pack – in this case Kickers Energy Spray – was more believable than one made in an advertisement. 

Three studies were designed to investigate the one notable difference between ads and packages – the proximity of claims made in each to the referenced product. 

Scientists exploring this area have tended previously to stick to investigating either the effects of advertising or the effects of packaging, but not both, as Fajardo explains.

“There is a significant amount of research, dating back several decades, on the effects of advertising on consumer behaviour. More recently, there has been some research on the effects of packaging on consumer behaviour,” she says. 

“In both cases, the research has implicitly assumed that findings documented in one context would apply to the other. This seemed unlikely to us; we could easily think of several ways the two message sources differ from each other and wanted to study how these differences could impact their overall effectiveness.”  

But isolating specific differences between the two media can be difficult. “There are many factors that need to be controlled for, when attempting to study and compare such different media contexts with each other,” she says.

From the outset of their experiments, their hunch was that packages would be a more believable source of information than ads. 

“This intuition was easily validated in a series of early pilot studies. The challenge with this project was pinpointing exactly why this might be the case. Which of the many potential differences between packages and ads would account for their difference in terms of believability?” says Fajardo.

Because – in general – previous research has shown that trust is improved with proximity, it made sense for them to look at product-proximity as a potential explanation for their central hypothesis – that packages are more believable than ads.

In the first study they looked at the effect of presentation material and claim-to-product proximity on actual purchase behaviour. “Under control conditions, participants were more likely to purchase a product when they saw a package of the product than when they saw an ad for the product. But, when we emphasised product-proximity, our effect was attenuated and the ad became as effective as the package in generating sales,” says Fajardo.

In the second study, they showed that this effect on purchase was driven by believability and, in the third, Fajardo and Townsend demonstrated another technique for emphasising product-proximity and making an ad as believable as a package.

However, in the experiments, the tests only compared packaging claims with print ads. So how does she think they would change for TV or online advertising?

“We needed to control for as many differences between ads and packages as possible. Logistically, the easiest way to do this was to compare print ads to packages. I would hazard a guess and say our effects would hold if other types of ads – for instance, television or radio ads – were compared against packages. This is because I believe people would consider these type of ads as lower in terms of product-proximity than packages,” says Fajardo.   

What about the fact that, because participants were physically nearer the product, they are clearly more likely to purchase because it’s there, under their noses?

“We tried to control for this by making it clear to all participants that the product was real and readily available. Specifically, everyone was told the experimenters had used the product as part of another study and were now selling leftover stock at a discount. While there still might have been some effect of physically seeing the product in front of them, this was probably not significant, given that we didn’t see a significant increase in sales when the product was – or was not – in front of them,” she says.  

The paper finally makes reference to contagion – where the attributes of one product can be transferred to another. For example, if a less-appealing product like toilet paper physically touches another product, that product becomes less liked because it is ‘infected’ by the negative attributes of the unappealing product. 

“In addition, attributes can be transferred from a person to a product. If we see an unattractive person touch a product, we associate that product with more negative attributes and don’t want it as much. Our research may be the first example of contagion from a written statement to a product,” adds Fajardo. 

Reference:

Where you say it matters: why packages are a more believable source of product claims than advertisements, by Tatiana Fajardo, Florida State University, and Claudia Townsend, University of Miami, Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2016