The fervor around cute products has spread far beyond plush children’s toys like Labubu and Squishmallow to cell phone cases and even credit card designs. And countless companies are leveraging this cute aesthetic—whether in the product itself or in its packaging—to increase consumer appeal.
“In marketing research, we’ve mostly focused on the effects of cute aesthetics”—whether a product design with cute versus plain images will get more people to buy the product, he says Hetana AharKellogg associate professor of marketing.
But Achar and her colleague, Carolyn Wells Kellera Kellogg graduate who is now a lecturer at Northwestern’s Medill School, wanted to investigate whether consumer preferences for cute products are affected by individual differences among consumers.
“Research on moral intuition and moral foundations suggests that people who hold politically conservative beliefs, compared to those with more liberal views, prioritize values related to bodily purity and holiness,” says Achar.
Building on this research, Achar and Keller conducted a series of studies on thousands of participants in the US, UK and India to better understand how one’s political ideology might affect their response to cute aesthetics.
They confirmed that political conservatives were more likely than political liberals not only to like cute products but also to buy them. One of the main reasons driving this behavior, they found, was the way conservatives associated cuteness with core values like innocence and physical purity.
“If you’re more conservative politically, you’re drawn to this child-cute aesthetic because of its moral alignment with the valuing of bodily purity,” says Achar.
Sweetness and purity
For their study, Achar and Keller focused on a specific concept of “cute.”
“In this case cuteness means childlike features: a rounded face, bigger eyes, round cheeks,” says Achar. This contrasts with a more whimsical type of cute, such as stylized images of polka dots or clouds, or “things that evoke a whimsical feeling.”
In one of their experiments, the researchers showed 868 participants a gift card containing one of three designs: a smiling baby with big eyes and a round body (cute design), polka dots in saturated colors (a whimsical design), or a white background (a plain design).
They found that political conservatives were more likely than liberals to be interested in the card with the childish cute design, but not the whimsical cute design, and more likely to say they would buy it. Conservatives were also more likely to agree that the cute design, but not the other designs, looked innocent and childish.
Similar findings emerged when the team conducted follow-up studies using different types of products—such as a water bottle, a laptop, and a sticker—as well as on people in different countries, including the US, UK and India. “It’s a very cross-cultural effect,” says Achar.
The pattern held true when examining consumer search behavior as well. Researchers looked at Google searches for a wide range of products over the course of a year and found that people were more likely to be interested in “cute” products—based on how often they included the term in their searches—in US states with higher percentages of conservatives.
Moral foundations
Achar and Keller’s research draws from established studies and theories related to human morality.
“The theory is that we all have many big moral foundations—like justice or purity—and researchers have mapped different ideologies onto those foundations,” says Achar.
For example, research has shown that there is a stronger connection between liberal ideology and justice, and a stronger connection between conservative ideology and purity.
This framework explains why Achar and Keller repeatedly found that conservatives preferred cute products—since they associated the cute aesthetic with purity and innocence. The researchers even found that aesthetic preferences were aligned with people’s attitudes on specific issues. In one study, for example, people who were against abortion or same-sex marriage—attitudes traditionally associated with sexual purity—were more likely to prefer cute products than those with opposing views.
Conversely, the association was broken when a product itself was associated with impurity or promiscuity. In one study, for example, researchers assessed people’s responses to two different products with childish cute designs: a mug and a condom. Conservatives were more interested in the cute mug than liberals, as expected, but conservatives were not more interested in the condom.
“If a product is associated with (perceived) debauchery, then the child-cute aesthetic is no longer ethically compatible and we don’t see the effect,” says Achar. “It is disabled because the product itself is considered impure from the point of view of physical purity.”
Marketing with kindness
What lessons can business and marketing leaders take from these findings?
First, there is a strong connection between values and aesthetics for a product or brand. “Ideological values have typically been associated with things like activism, voting, and donating—prosocial things,” says Achar. “Our work shows that values are even linked to visual aspects of consumption. If something as simple as a mug, which has a fairly clear, consistent function, is visually more consistent with your values, then it would be more attractive to you.”
This reality has clear implications for how companies and marketers can use aesthetics to strategically promote their products or ideas to different audiences. Too often, ideology-focused marketing tactics amount to preaching to the choir.
As Achar points out, “Prior to our research, we looked at a lot of anti-abortion campaigns, and a lot of them gravitated toward a childish cute aesthetic, targeting politically conservative people” who were already likely to favor such policies.
However, the research results suggest that campaigns may be able to make more money by instead targeting a group that does not naturally gravitate toward its products or offerings by using an aesthetic that appeals to that group’s values.
“Imagine a marketing manager wants to promote a green, sustainable product and speak to all the political conservatives,” says Achar. “Using a child-cute aesthetic should be more effective than a neutral aesthetic.”
