My first crush

3 minute read

Could our relationship status influence our consumption behaviour?

Why is it that while launching new products, most brands place a disproportionate amount of time and money focusing on college students and young adults compared to married or middle-aged people.

A group of researchers in China may have uncovered the reason.

These researchers hypothesized that people who have a romantic crush on someone have a greater tendency to be more adventurous and variety seeking in their consumption behaviour as well. This, they theorized, is attributable to the need to feel “in control” in one facet of life when there is lack of control in the other. In the case of relationships, researchers felt that since a ‘crush’ is usually one-sided with significant uncertainty around whether the feelings are reciprocated by their crush, human beings tend to compensate for this lack of control by exerting more control in their consumption patterns. One way this is displayed is by buying a wider variety of products as a proxy for control.

To test this theory, the researchers conducted an experiment.

In the first experiment they asked a group of students to take part in a study purportedly to examine consumer affinity for a Yoghurt brand. The students were divided into 2 groups and asked a series of profile questions (One of which was whether they currently had a crush on anyone). The students were then shown a picture of a yoghurt bundle and asked to indicate their attitude on a scale from 1 (negative/unfavorable/dislike it very much/very unlikely to buy) to 7 (positive/favorable/like it very much/very likely to buy). Group 1 was exposed to a bundle which had 5 cups of yoghurt of the same flavour while group 2 was shown a bundle with 5 different flavours of yoghurt.

When they studied the results it emerged that participants who had mentioned that they currently had a crush on another person responded more favourably to the bundle with the different flavours of yoghurt compared to the bundle that contained just a single flavour (5.39 vs. 4.49). Put differently, participants who reported currently having a romantic crush expressed a more positive attitude toward the variety bundle, compared to those who reported not having a romantic crush (5.39 vs. 4.69). When they reviewed the data for participants not currently having a crush they observed very little variance between their attitude towards either bundle of yoghurt.

The results from this study seem to validate the strategy brands often use when launching newer products and can offer great guidance to future brand managers when trying to improve uptake of their new products.

Original research by Xun (Irene) Huang and Ping Dong

https://myscp.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jcpy.1070