Insight of the Week
Don't Use Science to Sell Emotional Products
Last updated September 1, 2023
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Overview
Science is persuasive, unless you sell emotional products.
Across 10 studies, customers were less likely to buy emotional products with scientific rationales (Philipp-Muller et al., 2023).
- Science: "Our rigorous scientific development process ensures that Zoza cookies taste delicious, indulgent, and gooey."
- Control: "We ensure that Zoza cookies taste delicious, indulgent, and gooey."
Participants preferred the control cookies.
Why It Works
- Disfluency. Scientific reasons feel misplaced in emotional contexts. Emotional products are driven by feelings; they should be easy to process. A $24.37 pillow just feels wrong (Wadhwa & Zhang, 2015).
How to Apply
- Sell the Experience, Not the Details. Brooklinen could probably remove the "dual-core structure" blurb from their pillow description:
- Be Cautious With AI Features. Don't needlessly jump on the AI bandwagon.
- Explain Why Science is Necessary. A brief disclaimer minimized backlash in the studies. Scientists were also immune to this backlash.
Other New Stuff
- How Social Do We Need to Be? - Humans need social interaction to improve their well-being. But this goalpost is nearby. Based on research with 180k participants, a moderate amount of social interaction fulfills our intrinsic need. Afterward, these interactions produce diminishing returns (though it doesn't slope downward; Ren, Stavrova, & Loh, 2022).
- Cashless Payments Fuel Unhealthy Purchases - We're more likely to buy unhealthy food with credit cards because we feel less pain. Cash payments are more painful, which pushes our focus toward the guilt and risks associated with these purchases (Park, Lee, & Thomas, 2021).
- Anthropomorphic Money Increases Savings - People saved more money when they saw an image of cash with humanlike traits. It felt more vulnerable, as if it needed saving (Wang, Kim, S., Zhou, 2023).