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A Little Too Reliant on Specifications
By ALEX MINDLIN
Can consumers tell the
difference between a five-megapixel photo and a humble one-megapixel shot?
Is sunscreen with an SPF of 30 twice as effective as 15-SPF?
Consumers
lean heavily on product specifications in choosing what to buy — but a
paper recently published in the Journal of Consumer Research suggests that
such numbers are easily manipulated, and often uninformative.
For example, Chinese
college students, comparing photos from two cameras, far preferred the
sharper of the two images when they were told that the sharper image had
roughly four million total pixels, against two million pixels in the less
sharp one.
By contrast, subjects
who were told only that the images had diagonals of 2,900 and 2,090 pixels,
an equivalent measure, were far less likely to prefer the camera that took
the sharper photo.
“People rely on
specifications more than they should,” said Christopher K. Hsee, a
professor of marketing at the University of Chicago who wrote
the paper with three researchers from Shanghai Jiaotong University in
China. “Marketers can do a lot to manipulate those numbers.”
Toward the end of his
paper, Professor Hsee suggests that marketers develop new specifications
for their products. For example, he writes, “marketers of crispy biscuits
could invent and popularize a ‘crispness index.’ ”
ALEX MINDLIN
The New York Times，
Published: November 2, 2008
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