rotmanmagazine.ca / 119may act as symbols of personal accomplishment, provide
self-esteem, allow one to differentiate oneself and express
individuality, and help people through life transitions.
Some products, like paper towels, are used in a very
utilitarian fashion: People only care about how they function.
But, other products have meaning far beyond their utilitar-
ian aspects. Smartphones, for instance, have meaning above
and beyond the device itself: There is meaning attached to
whether you use Apple or, say, Samsung products.
What is a ‘symbolic’ brand?
These are brands that are better able than others to com-
municate something about the person using them. For ex-
ample, research shows that publicly consumed (vs. private-
ly consumed) and luxury (vs. necessity) products are best at
conveying symbolic meaning about an individual.
Meanwhile, brands that are very popular and used by
many different types of people (e.g., a Honda Civic, one of
the best-selling cars in North America) may not commu-
nicate specific associations about the person who uses it.
How do ‘reference groups’ influence our consumption?
A big part of our relationship with brands is based on who
else uses those products. Your readers might remember
those Apple advertisements from a few years back, featur-
ing the characters ‘Mac’ and ‘PC’, and focusing on humor-
ous stereotypes of what each user was like. Basically, if you
use that product, the image of the prototypical user associ-
ated with that product is going to be associated with you;
so, the question becomes, ‘Is this product’s image consis-
tent with who I am?’
If the prototypical user for a brand matches the kind of
person you think you are — or aspire to be — you are much
more likely to connect to that brand. On the other hand, if
the prototypical user does not indicate anything about who
you are, you will avoid it.
In your early research, you found that consumers are sys-
tematically biased in their concept of time. Please explain.
Unlike robots, human decision makers face limitations in
their capacity for processing information, have limited com-
putational abilities and are subject to a wide array of biases.
Our concept of time is one aspect of this, and it leads to two
categories of time: objective time and subjective time.
Objective time is time that can be accurately measured
with a calendar or a stopwatch. But subjective time is very
different. We humans are notoriously poor at judging time.
In our studies, we asked people, ‘If you had to wait one week
for Product X, how long would that seem to you?’ Then we
asked, ‘How long would three weeks seem? We found that in
consumers’ minds, three weeks’ time is actually much less
than three times what one week feels like. The implications
of this are significant, because people are often willing to
trade off receiving a benefit in the future, vs. getting some-
thing with a lesser benefit right now.Tell us how the economic concept of ‘diminishing marginal
returns’ relates to consumer behaviour.
If I give you a two pound weight to hold, and then add one
pound to it, you can easily tell me that the second load is
heavier. But if I give you a 50-pound weight and then add
one pound to it, it will be much harder for you to tell that you
are holding 51 pounds vs. 50.
If we created a graph of your ‘subjective feeling of
weight’, versus the objective weight, the subjective feeling
would go up more steeply in the beginning — because you
can tell the difference when the initial weight is low; but as
you get to higher amounts of weight, your perception of that
incremental change gets smaller and smaller, and it kind of
flattens out at a certain point.
We have found the same effect with time: One week
more time waiting for something seems like really a big deal
for something where the normal wait time is two weeks —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.