Marketers should consider more thoughtful ways to position personal improvement products in the increasingly competitive marketplace
The team of marketing experts concluded that consumers preferred learning about the incrementally less drastic — but more authentic — steps of personal change.
Image: Shutterstock
Weight loss aids, teeth whiteners, hair-growth serums: The market is crowded with personal improvement products, and when wooing customers, marketers naturally want to promote the best possible outcomes. In an effort to emphasize value and represent life-changing effects, they often include dramatically different “before” and “after” photos in advertisements.
After all, it seems intuitive that consumers would be motivated by the drastic impact a product may have. Why distract them with visualizing the gradual progression? Wouldn’t that come with the risk of discouraging them with a reminder of the effort and time it may take to achieve the desired results?
Actually, the common advertising “before and after” tactic is frequently not the most effective. That’s the finding of new research by Darden Professor Luca Cian, Chiara Longoni of Boston University and Aradhna Krishna of the University of Michigan. The team of marketing experts concluded that consumers preferred learning about the incrementally less drastic — but more authentic — steps of personal change.
“We thought it might be more persuasive to study a process of change. Instead of seeing photos of a bigger and slimmer person next to each other, imagine seeing multiple photos of a progression as a person gradually becomes slimmer,” says Cian of the study, which was published in the Journal of Marketing Research. “The ad becomes more credible, and clearly credibility is fundamental to ads that promise change.”
[This article has been reproduced with permission from University Of Virginia's Darden School Of Business. This piece originally appeared on Darden Ideas to Action.]