M&M’s as food for thought at the K.U. Leuven MarketingWinter Camp

On December 9, K.U. Leuven held their annual Mar-keting Winter Camp. It was an interesting day with a set of speakers coming from different disciplines. This guaranteed sufficient variety in topics and ensured that the attention of the crowd did not wane. For example, the talk by Tom Wenseleers, who is an Associate Professor of Entomology at K.U. Leuven. He gave some insight in the evolution of competition and cooperation in insect societies.

“Thought for Food.”

Another presentation that stood out was that of Joachim Vosgerau. He is an Associate Professor of Marketing at the Tepper School of Business at Car-negie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylva-nia. He held a presentation cleverly titled: “Thought for Food”. He does research on how imagined con-sumption can influence actual consumption. The common belief is that when people think about a certain food item they want, their desire for it

will increase. Vosgerau illustrated this with the fol-lowing example: if we imagine ourselves eating a perfectly cooked steak, our desire to eat it increa-ses. Similarly, when smokers think of the taste and smell of a cigarette, their desire for a cigarette will increase.

This being said Vosgerau and his colleagues found, contrary to the commonly held believes, that ima-gined consumption reduces the actual consump-tion. In their experiment participants were either asked to imagine eating M&M’s or to imagine per-forming another action (in this case inserting coins in a laundry machine). The participants were as-signed by the researchers to either imagine to eat a lot of M&M’s or only a small amount. The same goes for imagining inserting the coins into the laundry machine. Afterwards each participant was offered a bowl of M&M’s, of which they could eat as much as they wanted.As it turned out those participants who imagined consuming more M&M’s, ate less of it than those who had imagined consuming less M&M’s. The re-search also showed that this effect is specific to the food that was imagined to be consumed. In other words imagining eating M&M’s will not have an ef-fect on the (actual) consumption of other types of food. At the end of the Winter Camp I had a satisfied fee-ling: I had learned a bunch of new things and I was intellectually challenged. Yet there was one small thing that was lingering in my mind: the presen-

tations often had a strong academic undertone. A lot of attention was paid to the set-up and the techniques used in the research. This forces the researchers to make an abstraction of the reality, which is of course needed to create a controlled setting. Nevertheless, a great deal of information and validity of the research is lost because of the simplification of the real world.Often there are only a handful of factors that have to mimic the entire reality. Furthermore in a con-trolled setting a participant does not behave in the same way, as he would in the real world. The results of this fundamental research and experiments are very insightful and will undoubtedly prove to be very useful to all market researchers.But I do believe that applied market research has a high added value because it works with the world as it is and tries to understand people in all their complexity.

by Dries DekeukeleireResearcher @ WHY5Research

MOTIVATIONALRESEARCH

2012JAN