Here’s a roundup of some of our favorite findings about how emotions like anger, fear, disgust, and anticipation can shape what ends up in our shopping carts and calendars.
1. Anger can help consumers focus on what they want
Conventional wisdom suggests that before making a major purchase, it’s best to feel calm, cool and collected. After all, you wouldn’t want your emotions to get in the way of a smart decision. But what if this isn’t always true?
A set of studies by Michal Maimaran, a research professor of marketing at Kellogg, finds a surprising benefit of feeling angry when making decisions. Specifically, she and her colleagues find that angry consumers make more targeted choices, are less likely to delay their purchase, are less likely to compromise, and are ultimately more satisfied with their choices than those who feel sad, fearful, or even neutral.
No, that doesn’t mean we always have to act on our every angry whim. But it does suggest that our anger has the potential to help us focus on what is most important to us.
“We usually think of anger as negative, in the sense that it has a bad effect on us and would therefore hinder goal pursuit,” says Maimaran. “But anger can actually be beneficial to us. It’s surprisingly counterintuitive.”
2. Fear and disgust direct us toward the familiar
If anger can bring clarity to our purchasing decisions, fear and disgust can guide us toward the familiar.
In several studies, Gregory Carpenter, a marketing professor at Kellogg, and his colleagues found that thinking about communicable diseases—as opposed to unrelated things or even non-communicable diseases—leads people to prefer familiar brands and products over new ones. In fact, the amount of flu in each state can even predict purchases of some well-known comfort foods — like Campbell’s canned soups and Oreo cookies — over time. A 10 percent increase in flu was associated with a 1.6 percent increase in sales for Campbell’s, but only a 0.1 percent increase for other, lesser-known brands.
What happens? Researchers believe that infectious diseases trigger feelings of fear and disgust, which in turn influence our shopping preferences. Fear prompts us to take action to restore some semblance of control, while disgust makes us want to withdraw and turns us away from more new brands and products.
“We don’t think of buying a traditional Oreo as a way to bring control into our lives, but obviously that’s how people behave,” says Carpenter.
3. A bad mood can make those holidays less likely
When we feel disgusted, it seems that we should find the prospect of a fun experience—a concert, a vacation, a night out with friends—even more appealing and therefore be motivated to make it happen.
But that’s not generally the case, according to research by Aparna Labroo, a professor of marketing at Kellogg. She and her colleagues found that when people are in a bad mood, they have trouble imagining themselves engaging in pleasurable activities, which can lead to them avoiding them altogether.
“When we’re in a bad mood, it’s hard to simulate the experience of doing something pleasurable—and we attribute the difficulty of simulating to the pleasurable activity itself,” she explains. “It’s not right anymore, and then we’re more likely to avoid that activity.”
But more importantly, there is a catch: thinking about how happy and positive we will feel after a fun activity can help us get out of our rut. Better yet, says Labroo, stop thinking and “just do it.”
4. Prediction can shape the way we experience time
Most of us have experienced the logic-defying sensation that getting somewhere seems to take much longer than making the same journey in reverse. The feeling is so common that psychologists have a term for it: the “return effect.”
This perception can be at least partially explained by anticipation. Research by Kellogg marketing professor Derek Rucker and colleagues found that the return trip effect is stronger when people have a strong sense of anticipation about their destination—whether that anticipation is positive (like when we head to Disneyland). or negative (like when we go to the dentist).
Companies and researchers should take note: after all, time plays an important role in many aspects of the customer experience, from standing in a long checkout line, watching an app load, and waiting for delivery of a package. “It’s a call for researchers to pay more attention to how consumers understand or perceive the passage of time in their environment,” says Rucker.
5. Emotions make our consumer reviews more informative
Perhaps you’ve searched for movie, restaurant, or product reviews, only to encounter the “positivity problem”—many movies, restaurants, and products have positive reviews, and you can’t tell the difference between them. Rucker and his colleague Loran Nordgren, professor of management and organizations at Kellogg, offer an interesting solution.
Through computational analysis of hundreds of thousands of online reviews, researchers discovered that positive star and numerical ratings do not always reliably correlate with how well products and businesses ultimately did because they are so positive overall. But something else did: the sentimentality of critics.
Emotionality is the extent to which a reaction is based on emotion. “‘Awesome’ is a very positive word that also carries a lot of emotion with it,” explains Rucker. “‘Perfect’ is also a very positive word, but it doesn’t have a lot of sentimentality.”
Movies, books, and restaurants with reviews that scored high on sentimentality were ultimately more successful in terms of sales (or in the case of restaurants, daily reservations) than those with less sentimental reviews. That’s useful information for consumers, of course — but also for companies who want to know if their product really connects with people.
“The promise of these online platforms is that we can now see and learn from others, and that should be of great value,” says Nordgren. But the overwhelming number of positive reviews has diminished their usefulness, resulting in a missed opportunity. Examining emotionality is an important way to tap into “that unfulfilled promise.”
