Expedite Results by Cuing Causes

In a Journal of Consumer Research article with the seductive title, “Changing the Future by Reshaping the Past,” London Business School researchers tell about creativity and chewing gum.
     In one study, all the participants began by listening to about three minutes of instrumental music. The participants were told they’d be asked questions about the music, but what really came next was administration of the Rorschach inkblot test. Upon completion, all the participants were told they had shown very high creativity on the Rorschach. Even those who hadn’t shown high creativity were told this.
     Then one group of the participants was also told something else: The music they’d listened to was designed to enhance creativity on tasks like the Rorschach. The other participants were told that, although some types of music enhance creativity, they had not heard this type of music earlier.
     What’s this have to do with retailing? The answer has to do with time estimates. All the participants were asked to guess how much time had elapsed between listening to the music and doing the creativity task.
     Talking about guesses, what’s your guess as to how the estimates from the two groups compared? Did the group told about the creativity enhancement from music end up estimating the interval to be longer or shorter than did the others?
     The answer is that the cause-and-effect information, even when not necessarily true, resulted in shorter time estimates. When we’re told two experiences—such as listening to music and excelling at a creativity task—are strongly related, this changes our memory of how much time had passed.
     The London researchers then conducted studies in which they told some participants there was a relationship between chewing gum and doing well on an attention task. Those given this information estimated the time between gum chewing and attention performance to be shorter than with a matched group not told there’s a connection. And this estimate of quick action produced a pronounced preference for the gum over using an energy bar to improve attention.
     We won’t want to lie to shoppers about cause-and-effect, as was done by the researchers. But by cuing your shoppers about real causal relationships between using a product and enjoying the benefits, you implant in their memories an impression of the effectiveness being quick. In compressing time, you strengthen preferences for the service or product and for purchasing it at your store.

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Clarify Cause & Effect with Users