They’ve all been marketed as blind boxes—containers purchased without the customer knowing what specific items are inside. Baseball player cards were first packaged with bubble gum in the 1920’s by Fleer and Topps brands with the objective of increasing gum sales to kids. On A&E’s “Storage Wars,” adults bid on abandoned storage units at auctions before knowing what's inside. A Birchbox subscriber receives a mystery assortment of curated beauty enhancement products each month.
University of Newcastle and University of Sydney researchers explored the type of blind box purchases in which the contained items are collectibles for the buyer. What these researchers documented is an addictive loop of impulsive purchases. The researchers report that the addiction potential is high enough to have caught the attention of regulatory agencies.
Consumers are drawn to blind box collectibles via the appeal of uncertainty and the urge for completion. As to uncertainty, in a University of Chicago study, people worked harder for a bag containing either two or four chocolates than did another group told the bag had four chocolates. The tickle of ambiguity stimulated these study participants to act.
The thrill of the tease is an aspect of this. Show shoppers a gift box being slowly opened, and their evaluations of what’s inside the box will be more positive than if you just showed them the item. The unboxing video genre has gained notable numbers of YouTube followers.
The pleasure-from-watching-the-striptease is so compelling that researchers from Chinese University of Hong Kong saw it even with an empty box. In this case, the observers of the unveiling liked the empty box itself more, on average, than an equivalent set of consumers who were only shown the box.
As to the drive to complete the whole set, blind box collectible purchases might be compared to slot machine gambling. Because the purchaser doesn’t know what specific items in the set will be acquired, they could continue buying in hopes of filling in what’s missing in their collection. This behavior could easily become economically imprudent and potentially addictive.
In your own use of blind box collectible marketing, stay alert for any need to nudge a compulsive buyer toward counseling just as a casino operator would with their clientele. Also consider recommending collection groups where your customers could trade their duplicates while socializing.
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Tickle with Uncertainty
Image at top of post based on photo from Kaboompics
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