Accentuate the Positive Item Characteristics

People purchasing food are more influenced by what will make them healthier than by what would make them unhealthier. This was seen in how study participants expressed greater interest in corn flakes claiming to be high in protein, fiber, and vitamins than in the same cereal claiming to be low in fat, sodium, and carbs.
     The University of Groningen and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam researchers who conducted the study attribute the difference in preference to shopper attributions of value. Consumers usually associate “higher” and “more” with increased benefits. This is usually less true for “lower” and “less.” Advertising the addition of healthful characteristics adds greater perceived value to a product than does advertising the reduction of unhealthful ingredients.
     The generalizability of this addition-subtraction difference was shown in another of the researchers’ studies: An item featured as “now enriched with alanine”—with alanine described to these participants as beneficial for health—received higher favorability ratings than did an item featured as “now reduced in alanine”—with alanine described to those participants as harmful to health.
     The implication for marketers is to emphasize what’s added over what’s subtracted. Similarly, people rate the same merchandise as better when a description is framed positively than when framed negatively. Researchers at Seattle University and University of San Diego cited past studies showing that consumers are more likely to say they’ll buy a cut of beef described as 75% lean compared to 25% fat, and then, in their own studies, found that people told a chewing gum had more than 95% natural flavors ended up giving higher ratings than those told it had less than 5% artificial flavors.
     In fact, there’s a risk in bringing up the negative at all. When Coca-Cola announced, “Our Bonaqua lightweight mineral water bottles are specially engineered to use 34% less plastic,” we might expect the purchase likelihood of the product to grow. But studies at City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Baptist University, and The Chinese University of Hong Kong showed the opposite can happen. Consumers could respond, “Gee, I wasn’t even thinking about how my mineral water comes entombed in a slug of plastic. I’ll stop buying bottled mineral water.”
     These researchers found that you can minimize the negative response by nudging shoppers to pay more attention to the decrease in the bad than to the presence of the bad. Accomplish this by discussing the upsides of change.

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