Describe Your Product With Directional Consistency

What is your product benefit?

Some products create an increase or decrease:

• Skin creams reduce wrinkles
• Shampoos increase silkiness
• Air fresheners remove odors

And you might depict a separate change:

• Increase in skin cells
• Increase in blood flow
• Reduction of hormones

Both directions should be consistent even if they're unrelated (Bharti & Sussman, 2024).

Customers preferred:

• An energy supplement that increased a hormone
• A sleep supplement that decreased a hormone

Why It Works

• Processing Fluency. Something feels right, and we blame the product.

How to Apply

• Tweak Your Explanation. Does your cream reduce wrinkles? Describe the reduction of collagen, rather than the increasing turnover of skin cells (Bharti & Sussman, 2024).
• Tweak Your Branding. Does your supplement reduce anxiety by increasing chemicals? Perhaps it should increase calmness instead.
• Describe an Increase When Possible. Explanations with an increase often converted better. Similar effects occur with size: Bigger seems better, even if size is irrelevant to actual benefits (Silvera et al., 2002).
• Borrow the Right Metaphors. Citizens preferred different solutions for crime: They preferred social reforms and treatments for a crime virus, yet they preferred attacking the problem with harsh enforcements when it was a crime beast (Thibodeau, 2016).

Related Applications

• Align Directionality of Discounts. Discounts should reduce losses for prevention needs (e.g., save 30% on a first aid kit), but increase gains for acquisition needs (e.g., extra 30% off for bulk purchases; Ramanathan & Dhar, 2010).

• Bharti, S., & Sussman, A. B. (2024). Consumers Prefer Products That Work Using Directionally Consistent Causal Chains. Journal of Consumer Research, ucae066.
• Ramanathan, S., & Dhar, S. K. (2010). The effect of sales promotions on the size and composition of the shopping basket: Regulatory compatibility from framing and temporal restrictions. Journal of Marketing Research, 47(3), 542-552.
• Silvera, D. H., Josephs, R. A., & Giesler, R. B. (2002). Bigger is better: The influence of physical size on aesthetic preference judgments. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 15(3), 189-202.
• Thibodeau, P. H. (2016). Extended metaphors are the home runs of persuasion: Don’t fumble the phrase. Metaphor and Symbol, 31(2), 53-72.