Nourish Evaluation When Multiple Choice

Shoppers decide differently when the choice is which among multiple items to purchase than when deciding whether or not to purchase a particular item. First off, people like choices. When Tulane University researchers showed consumers two DVD players, 32% said they’d buy the first and 34% said they’d buy the other. But with an equivalent group of consumers shown just one of the players, only 10% said they’d buy it.
     Beyond this, in the situation of choosing whether to purchase a particular item, people become especially sensitive to the numbers. Researchers at University of Mississippi and University of Arkansas found this to be true with initiatives aiming to have consumers select healthier foods. In the four studies, participants were asked to judge the nutritional value of either a single item or a few items. Those facing the single item paid more attention to the quantitative information—the numbers describing the calories and contents—than to evaluative information—a retailer’s interpretation of the item’s healthfulness. But the participants asked to judge a few items paid more attention to the retailer’s evaluative information than to a comparison of the numbers. More importantly, evaluative information carried more punch than the raw numbers in determining how likely a shopper was to buy the healthier item from among a set.
     As you’d expect, both the phrasing you use in the evaluations and the attitudes of the shoppers play into this. University of Alberta and University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers looked into the effects of what’s been labeled with the attention-getting phrase “fat tax.” The warning tag used in the research read, “This product is high in fat. It has been taxed due to its less healthy nutritional content. Health Canada.” The study participants were not told until the end of the study that the label was fictitious.
     The additional cost made some people significantly less likely to buy. However, they also become less likely to buy other products. Their irritation about the fat tax led to them boycotting. They may be healthier for it, but you’re losing sales.
     Other consumers were willing to pay even more than they would for a fat-taxed product if that higher-priced product didn’t carry the warning label.
     Still others didn’t fall into either of these two groups. However, cycling us back to where we began, for all the study participants, feeling they had choices led to them selecting healthier options.

For your profitability: Sell Well: What Really Moves Your Shoppers

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Tax Our Ingenuity to Keep Customers Healthy
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