What we see is what we think we get

November 15, 2006
SMH

Marketing is the art of getting customers to believe the choice is all theirs, writes Ross Gittins.

WHAT innocents we are. We imagine ourselves to be the masters of our consumer fate, the captains of our retail soul. We spend our hard-earned incomes carefully, diligently sorting through the ever-widening choice available to us until we find just what we want.

When you think about it, many people devote large slabs of their lives to hunting out the purchases that suit them best. American consumers are most advanced in this science - most insistent they be given exactly what it is they're seeking - but we're not far behind.

That's the way we see ourselves and that's the way economists see us. Their "doctrine of consumer sovereignty" places shoppers at the centre of the capitalist universe.

The system exists not to advance the capitalists but to serve the consumers. They call the shots. Businesses maximise their profits by meeting their customers' needs as faithfully as possible. Those who put the customer first do best; those who don't risk bankruptcy.

Consumers, for their part, weigh up every purchase, calculating how much "utility" this one will bring compared with that one.

The funny thing about economists, however, is that though they regard consumption as the sole end and object of economic life, consumption itself doesn't much interest them.

They are not interested in studying the actual processes by which we choose what we buy.

Which is, perhaps, just as well. If they did, they might find it too disillusioning.

The profession that does study our choices and how we make them is, of course, the marketers. Their dark art fascinates me.

In Malcolm Gladwell's eye-opening book Blink, published by Penguin, he introduces us to one of the great figures in American marketing, Louis Cheskin, and his concept of "sensation transference".

"Cheskin was convinced that when people give an assessment of something they might buy in a supermarket or a department store, without realising it they transfer sensations or impressions that they have about the packaging of the product to the product itself," Gladwell says.

"To put it another way, Cheskin believed that most of us don't make a distinction - on an unconscious level - between the package and the product. The product is the package and the product combined."

In the late 1940s, margarine was not popular. Almost everyone preferred butter. Cheskin wondered whether the problem was with the margarine itself or with the things people associated it with.

At that time American margarine was white. He had it coloured yellow, like butter, then staged a series of luncheon lectures for women. Some were served butter, some margarine. When asked to rate the speakers and the food, everyone thought the "butter" just fine.

Cheskin told his client to call the product Imperial Margarine, so it could put an impressive crown on the package. And he put it in a foil wrapper because foil was associated with quality. In taste tests between white margarine and foil-wrapped yellow Imperial Margarine the more carefully packaged product won every time.

In the years since then, Cheskin's company has confirmed the power of sensation transference many times.

A business producing a certain brand of cheap brandy, which had long been the dominant brand in its category, wanted to know why it was losing market share to another brand. The two brands were similarly priced and equally available. In a blind-taste test the two were roughly the same.

The taste test was repeated, but this time people were told which was which. They preferred the one that had been dominant, suggesting there was a sensation transference from the name. So why was it losing market share?

Next they did a taste test leaving the bottles in the background. The dominant brand had an ordinary wine bottle, whereas the rival had a flashier, decanter-like bottle. This time more people preferred the brandy from the fancy bottle.

Just to check, they did a final test in which the client's brandy was served from the rival's bottle and vice versa. The client won.

So the client had the right taste and a favoured brand name, but the wrong packaging. It changed its bottle to something more like its rival's and regained its lost market share.

Cheskin's company also experimented with the 7 Up bottle, adding more yellow to the green on the label. In taste tests, people complained the drink had a lot more lime or lemon flavour than they were used to.

A certain brand of tinned ravioli had a picture of its supposed chef on the label. When the marketers changed him from a photograph to a cartoon figure people were less satisfied with the taste and quality of the ravioli.

When they added a tiny sprig of parsley to the logo on a can of meat, people perceived the meat to be fresher. When peaches were switched from a tin to a glass container, people thought they tasted better.

When ice-cream is sold in a cylindrical container rather than a rectangular tub people are willing to pay a bit more for it.

So there you are. We're conscious only of our conscious decision-making but, in reality, our decisions are heavily influenced by extraneous factors we're not conscious of.

This would be true, no doubt, of even the most calculating and "rational" among us. Even the clear-headed, cold-hearted economists prefer and buy the brand of tinned meat that has a bit of parsley in its trademark.

In consequence, the well-advised producer can wrap the consumer round his little finger, influencing our choices by making the most trivial, irrelevant changes.

But if a producer has to change its logo to make its product more acceptable to the customer, doesn't that prove it's the consumer who calls the shots? Doesn't the addition of a sprig of parsley on the label enhance the utility we gain from a can of meat?

I guess it turns on whether the extra gratification we gain from choosing the product with the more attractive packaging is lasting or fleeting, real or illusionary.