Change of Habit

[Sponsored Article]

By Professor Jaideep SENGUPTA,
Synergis-Geoffrey Yeh Professor of Business,
Chair Professor of Marketing, 
HKUST Business School

As you’re walking along the street on a hot summer afternoon, you receive a call from a friend who has just fallen sick from an infectious disease. Shortly afterwards, you spot an ice-cream stand with two of its flavors on sale: one is a ubiquitous chocolate flavor, the other is an unusual cherry dark chocolate. Which one will you choose? 

Questions such as these have become particularly relevant in recent times as COVID-19 rages across the world, making it ever-more important for marketers to understand how infection-related cues shape consumer behavior. Indeed, such cues, albeit less starkly threatening than the pandemic, have always been present, whether they arise from a family member coming down with the common cold, or being exposed to a coughing stranger, or even a fleeting glimpse of a hospital ward on a TV show. 

Despite their ubiquity, very little research has examined how such disease cues affect consumers’ product preferences, a gap that my student HUANG Yunhui (now an assistant professor at Ohio State University) addressed in her PhD dissertation carried out under my guidance. Our research, which has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Consumer Research, shows that even relatively innocuous reminders of infection exert a systematic effect on product preference by increasing consumers’ relative preference for atypical versus typical product options. In the example above, therefore, we predict that you will become more likely to choose the cherry dark chocolate after hearing about your sick friend. 

Evolutionary theory and customer preferences

We based our predictions on an evolutionary theory which argues that because of the millennia-old threat to survival posed by infectious diseases, a “psychological immune system” has evolved in human beings. This system helps to protect us against diseases by inducing us to seek out objects and individuals that seem linked to good health, while alerting us to avoid those that seem linked to bad health.