Managerial Empathy Facilitates Egocentric Predictions of Consumer Preferences

Abstract

Common wisdom suggests that managerial empathy (i.e., the mental process of taking a consumer perspective) helps executives separate their personal consumption preferences from those of consumers, thereby preventing egocentric preference predictions. The results of the present investigation, however, show exactly the opposite. First, the authors find that managerial empathy ironically accelerates self-reference in predictions of consumer preferences. Second, managers’ self-referential tendencies increase with empathy because taking a consumer perspective activates managers’ private consumer identity and, thus, their personal consumption preferences. Third, empathic managers’ self-referential preference predictions make them less likely to use market research results. Fourth, the findings imply that when explicitly instructed to do so, managers are capable of suppressing their private consumer identity in the process of perspective taking, which helps them reduce self-referential preference predictions. To support their conclusions, the authors present four empirical studies with 480 experienced marketing managers and show that incautiously taking the perspective of consumers causes self-referential decisions in four contexts: product development, communication management, pricing, and celebrity endorsement.

Harmful Effects of Mental Imagery and Customer Orientation During New Product Screening

“…Specifically, we ask whether adopting a customer orientation during the screening stage of the NPD process brings about unexpected and undesirable cognitive biases. Our investigation contributes to the viewpoint in the literature that marketing decisions are influenced by the cognitions of individual managers (e.g., Hattula et al 2015). In particular, we contribute to the growing recognition that cognitive biases influence marketing decisions in a variety of nonnormative ways, such as escalating commitment to new products that are failing (Biyalogorsky, Boulding, and Staelin 2006) and being unrealistically optimistic regarding judgmental forecasts of sales (Kahneman and Lovallo 1993).…”

Marketers Project Their Personal Preferences onto Consumers: Overcoming the Threat of Egocentric Decision Making

“…5 In other words, the ironic monitoring process is considered equivalent to a "prime" of decision makers' personal preferences in the existing literature on suppression attempts (Higgins 1996;Macrae et al 1994;Wegner 2009). Moreover, it is well-documented that priming personal preferences inflates the effects of personal preferences on preference predictions (i.e., the FCE increases; Hattula et al 2015;Higgins 1996;Krueger and Clement 1994). We therefore expect that for low levels of preference certainty, preference suppression attempts will trigger a Wegner-type ironic monitoring process, which in turn increases the FCE.…”

“…Moreover, Hattula et al (2015) have shown that marketers are also susceptible to the FCE and that the size of the FCE depends on marketers' level of empathy with consumers. Specifically, their studies indicate that instructing (vs. not instructing) marketing managers to empathize with consumers increases their susceptibility to the FCE.…”

“…Online supplement: https://doi.org/10.1177/0022243721998378 A series of influential studies in marketing have established that marketing executives are affected by a multitude of undesirable behavioral tendencies in their decision making and have investigated strategies to avoid these tendencies (e.g., Blattberg and Hoch 1990;Mittal, Ross, and Tsiros 2002;Perkins and Rao 1990;Puto 1987;Qualls and Puto 1989;Ross 1991). However, none of the existing studies have examined how marketing managers can avoid the so-called "false consensus effect" (FCE)-that is, the tendency to project personal preferences onto target consumers (Hattula et al 2015;Krueger and Clement 1994). Yet, this research question is highly relevant from a managerial perspective.…”

What Is It That Design Thinking and Marketing Management Can Learn from Each Other?

“…Managers are not always able to empathize with customers' thoughts and feelings. Current research reveals a negative effect; managerial empathy may even facilitate egocentric predictions of consumer preferences (Hattula et al 2015), meaning that managers who try to develop empathy for the customer's situation reinforce their own prejudices. Furthermore, faked market research using personas can be misused very easily and retroactively to validate design and justify design decisions.…”