Solve Mysteries of Tribal Cues on Items

In a study of U.S. consumers, researchers at China’s Zhejiang University and Shanghai University of International Business and Economics found that displaying an American flag image on a T-shirt produced lower evaluations of the item. Yet a team of researchers from Duke University, Cornell University, and University of Waterloo saw that featuring an American flag on a T-shirt increased interest in purchasing the item among a group of U.S. consumers.
     An explanation for these seemingly contradictory outcomes might be seen in another study of tribal cues—a study which used for American residents not an American flag, but instead a Christian cross and Muslim crescent moon plus a star. But as with the American flag studies, the findings were not straightforward.
     For this University of Wyoming study, participants were shown a print ad for a coffee shop they’d not heard about before. In some cases, the ad included one or the other religious symbol and for the remaining participants, there was no religious symbol. All participants were asked how likely they’d be to patronize the coffee shop and their feelings about the coffee shop. Those participants shown the ad which included a religious symbol were also asked to speculate on why the owner of the coffee shop would choose to do that.
     The overall finding was that use of the religious symbol didn’t make much difference in patronage intentions. But digging deeper, it was seen that the assumed motivation for use of the symbol did. If the motivation was to reach a specific target market, it was a positive. This held true across participants, not only for those who had identified themselves as Muslim.
     This brings us back to the studies with the American flag. The Chinese researchers’ explanation for the negative impact, as verified by additional studies, was that the U.S consumers saw the inclusion of the cue as a contrived appeal to patriotism. The researchers described the study participants’ reaction as outrage.
     For the Duke-Cornell-Waterloo study, presentation of the T-shirt with the American flag had been preceded by asking the study participants to read an article highly critical of the U.S. The group among those participants who then were more highly attracted to the T-shirt were those who had high confidence in the American culture. The perceived motivation for the shirt including the flag was to provide an opportunity for consumers to bear witness to this confidence.

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