Rotman Management — Spring 2017

118 / Rotman Management Spring 2017

make part of your message appear in larger print or that you

ensure your brand is placed next to a well-known competi-

tor, so people can make comparisons (assuming that those

comparisons would be favourable to you). Making salience

work for you varies depending on the environment, and

how information is displayed in that environment. A general

principle is to try to use the package, ads, information dis-

plays or other factors under your control to make processing

that is favourable to your product easy to do.

Of course, in some cases, people do have well-articulat-

ed preferences. This usually occurs when they are familiar

and experienced with the product involved, and a more tra-

ditional, rational choice theory may be applicable in these

situations. But I have found that, even in such cases, contex-

tual factors often intrude.

Talk a bit more about the importance of the decision-

making context.

The notion is, if the context matters so much — and re-

search indicates that it does — then when you are doing any

kind of market research, you should start by studying the

context. Then, you need to match the context that consum-

ers will face — as best you can — to your product or service

design. This is what we call ‘context matching’.

Let’s say you produce a gourmet coffee product, but

there is nothing systematic about where it appears with

respect to competing products. That is a lost opportunity.

You need to look into the real-world environment of the

brick-and-mortar store. You can’t ignore it. Furthermore,

if people often make decisions on the spot, and if they will

process whatever information is the easiest to grasp in that

situation, then, as noted above, you need to make informa-

tion that is favourable to your brand very easy to process.

For example, suppose you’ve cut the sodium in your

soup by 10 per cent. You can say on the package that it’s 10

per cent lower in sodium, but you haven’t made it easier for

people to find out what they really want to know — which is,

how does your soup compare to its competitors? To address

this, you might put an image of a table with a few bowls of

soup on the package that shows how your brand compares

to others. This way, you don’t have to worry about how

close your product is placed to other brands in the store.

Talk a bit about how our identity is tied to the brands we

consume.

Whether it’s the clothing you wear, the kind of car you drive

or the music you listen to, all of these things send signals

to other people about your identity. Brands become linked

to our identity when they are able to help us achieve goals.

For example, brands can be used to meet self-expression

needs, publicly or privately; they can serve as tools for so-

cial integration or for connecting us to the past; and they

Shoppers want to be able to compare your product to

its competitors — and as a result, you should make that

easy to do.

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