CLIK Conference 2023 Reveals Some Surprising Consumer Behaviors

Every year, the CLIK conference presents some of the best examples of consumer research from a range of subjects and sources. 

In partnership between the University of Louisville and Doe-Anderson, This year’s conference offered attendees insights into a range of subjects with an expanded outlook. John Birnsteel, CEO of Doe-Anderson and Professor Michael Barone, Chair Marketing Department at the University of Louisville, College of Business offered their views on some of the top studies at the conference.

Charlene Weisler: What set this year’s conference apart from previous years?

Birnsteel: This year we saw a lot of multicultural themes coming through in the research. In terms of multicultural, we oftentimes think about that as gender or race but this was political – a kind of diversity of political ideology. It's the second year in a row that a paper has been presented looking at political ideology and that was a highlight - the implications that politics can have on consumer decision making.

Weisler: You have several very interesting studies. Tell me about the surprising conclusion to the Status vs Uncertainty study and explain how marketers can fall into stereotyping and what they can do to prevent that.

Birnsteel: This study looked at political leanings and the propensity to adopt what they call a really new product, an “RNP.” What the research showed is that it was a reliable predictor of uptake. But what was surprising was that I think most of us would think, if asked, “Who's more likely to pick up a new product, a progressive or a conservative?” You'd probably say a progressive, but the research showed that messages and a focus on the status of having something new first was really compelling to the conservative audience. So with really new products, conservative ideologically leaning people were more likely to pick that up, as opposed to progressive people who were more compelled by messages of the high performance of the product, not the fact that it was new.

Barone: If you can, through readily available data, identify consumers (by political) ideology, you can position the same product in two different ways, depending on which segment you're trying to reach based on whether it has to be more about status or performance. It could be the same innovation that's out there. You'll just be more effective marking it one way for people who identify more conservatively and marketing it in a different way for people who are more liberal in their mindsets.

Weisler: Looking at some of the major studies at the conference, what was the one biggest surprising conclusion of each study?

Birnsteel: Looking at cultural differences was important for the Top Rated or Best Seller study. Interdependent cultures were more compelled by the top rated, so much so to even pay more for those products.

Birnsteel: The Just Keep It: Returnless Product Replacements Signal Trust and Increase Brand Support study revealed that return-less replacement policies signal trust and increased brand support. It’s an overlooked benefit in the idea that the more trusting you are of people, the more they'll trust you. From a business perspective, I was thinking about the cost implications, you know, how much the price of how much is it worth to give away products that you're not going to get returned back or might not get returned back.

Birnsteel: With the Periodic Donations are a Diagnostic Cue of Donor Charitable Commitment study I was surprised that what was perceived to be greater by consumers was for a company to perhaps give a million dollars over 10 years and show that sustained commitment rather than if a company gives 10 million dollars to a cause as a one-time donation.

Barone: There's literature out there on competitive altruism that kind of speaks to the status signaling effect of really large donations that would provide sort of a different pull towards the one time big splash donations. Rather, within the range studied here, relatively smaller amounts and  more frequent giving is a better signal of credibility and corporate social responsibility efforts.

Birnsteel: With the No Comments study understanding the interpersonal and professional consequences of disabling social media comments, you can see why a company would turn off comments when things get heated, right? You'd think that heated comments would actually turn people off. But the absence of dialogue turned people away. I think this is actually something that people in public relations have known for a long time. Like, you don't say ‘no comment’ because while it shuts down the conversation – it can leave a negative impression.

Birnsteel: The Entitative Effects of the And-Brand Name was a fun one. This paper looked at having brand names with the word “and” in it and the implications it has on consumer mindsets. I think the presenter actually reproduced Doe-Anderson’s logo into Doe & Anderson. It substantiated the belief that that a group with “and” in their brand name can connote more credibility than an individual because consumers think there's more accountability there and more trust.

This article first appeared in Mediapost.com

CLIK Behavior Research Forum Focuses on Real World Applications

The CLIK Consumer Behavior Research Forum, founded five years ago by the Universities of Cincinnati, Louisville, Indiana and Kentucky, offers universities the opportunity the present papers grounded in media research. This year, topics included “Starbucks America vs. McDonald's America” which studied how political ideology influences consumer affinity for brands and another diving into the question of “Should Marketing Messages Be Assertive?”

The forum is sponsored by Louisville-based agency Doe-Anderson whose EVP/COO, John Birnsteel, noted that the current CLIK conference offers more applicable insights for marketers, concentrating more on the business and utility of research and not just theory.  “Our industry is rife with subjectivity,” he explained, “Any opportunity we find to help build marketing decisions on grounded research is one we support.”

For Professor Michael Barone, Chair, Marketing Department, College of Business, University of Louisville, “Doe Anderson’s involvement prompted us to veer our research talks in a little more relevant way.  To me, the best research has two components- Its rigorous, but it is also relevant, and for me that always means starting in the marketplace.”

Charlene Weisler: What are the best pieces of advice for marketers from the forum?

Birnsteel: I found calls to action quite interesting. You would think a strong call to action would really make people sit up and listen but it almost had the opposite effect. Being too assertive, can turn us into stubborn consumers.

Another piece of research done by a fellow at Indiana University mined ‘chat’ conversations.  When you go into buy something you have a chat exchange with the chat bot. His approach to the research was to access chat conversations and use AI machine learning to mine out the conversations to determine what the chat bot was and what it wasn’t able to answer.

Barone: What I found interesting from a business standpoint is that the company that gave the researcher the chat data was able to put a price on that data they shared with the University of Indiana and donate it as a tax deduction. We all talk about the value of data, but the way the company was able to donate the data to a researcher and put a value on that to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars was fascinating.

When it comes to blockchain, trust marks brands like Fairtrade and USDA Organic that validate claims are helpful, but research highlighted that leveraging the power of blockchain to verify claims leads to higher purchase intent. 

Weisler: What was the most surprising outcome or finding from CLIK?

Birnsteel: I was surprised to learn about the power – or in some cases lack thereof of influencers. The closer someone identifies an influencer as being “like me” the more likely that person is to be turned off by a brand that is disclosed as paying that influencer to promote it. It seems that followers wonder why the brand isn’t paying them the same attention as the influencer and get upset. However, this is not the case for well-known celebrities who are identified as receiving payment from a brand. In these instances, followers tend to gain affinity for that brand.  Bad news for #NextDoorNina but Kim and Khloe can breathe easy.

Also, with online shopping experiences when consumers are served a list of products and the highest priced one is the one the retailer recommends, most consumers are likely to under-weight that recommendation because they believe the retailer is trying to benefit itself.

Barone: I thought the chat bot finding was surprising because you think about typing in sensitive questions about certain products with a computerized entity. You think about who knows where that data goes, that people would trust it less. But, in fact, I think because of the embarrassment factor they actually prefer that mechanism rather than talking to a real person. The best research finding are ones, when you hear them you’re like ‘oh yeah - I get it!’ but you never would think about them initially.

Weisler: What’s the long-term goal of CLIK and the partnership between U of L and Doe-Anderson? 

Barone: There’s this international group called the Marketing Science Institute (MSI)– academics who want industry partnerships to access data, share findings. The CLIK Forum is like MSI on a smaller scale where we’ve got academics and industry folks working hand in hand to uncover new insights in marketing.

Birnsteel: We started our multicultural research with U of L.   Why the U of L of all places? Why not Miami or Houston? But after we had Breonna Taylor, our city’s focus became ‘how are we not?’ How are we are not understanding each other in the right ways? Raising funds for this was not a hard lift because everybody here felt an obligation to help out with this issue. 

This article first appeared in www.Mediapost.com

Artwork by Charlene Weisler