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

Abstract

This research explores how marketing managers can avoid the so-called false consensus effect—the egocentric tendency to project personal preferences onto consumers. Two pilot studies were conducted to provide evidence for the managerial importance of this research question and to explore how marketing managers attempt to avoid false consensus effects in practice. The results suggest that the debiasing tactic most frequently used by marketers is to suppress their personal preferences when predicting consumer preferences. Four subsequent studies show that, ironically, this debiasing tactic can backfire and increase managers’ susceptibility to the false consensus effect. Specifically, the results suggest that these backfire effects are most likely to occur for managers with a low level of preference certainty. In contrast, the results imply that preference suppression does not backfire but instead decreases false consensus effects for managers with a high level of preference certainty. Finally, the studies explore the mechanism behind these results and show how managers can ultimately avoid false consensus effects—regardless of their level of preference certainty and without risking backfire effects.

The role of social projection in consumers' commonness fallacy

“…Our findings suggest that even if managers don't rely on their own preferences in such decisions, they would still overpredict consumers' preferences for the frequently consumed items. Therefore, when designing interventions (e.g., Herzog et al, 2021), it is not sufficient to address egocentric biases.…”

“…Finally, another related substantive area is managers' predictions of consumers' choices. Research in this area suggests that managers often anchor on their own preferences when predicting consumer choice (Hattula et al, 2015; Herzog et al, 2021). Imagine a manager designing a product assortment or predicting the inventory requirements for the next sales cycle.…”

“…Our findings suggest that even if managers don't rely on their own preferences in such decisions, they would still overpredict consumers' preferences for the frequently consumed items. Therefore, when designing interventions (e.g., Herzog et al, 2021), it is not sufficient to address egocentric biases. To increase prediction accuracy, such interventions should jointly address multiple sources of prediction errors over and above egocentric sources.…”

Healthy in the wrong way: Mismatching of marketers’ food claim use and consumers’ preferences in the United States but not France

“…In fact, the most highly rated claim by American respondents in terms of total preferences was "good source of calcium and vitamin D." The experts explained that breakfast cereals have always been enriched and are one of the few food categories with fortification claims, hence they assumed that consumers would know this and disregard any such claim as "old news." These comments underscore that food marketers must be careful not to project their own knowledge and preferences onto consumers (Herzog et al, 2021).…”

Revista de alto impacto especializada en Marketing

“…Entre 2015 y 2019 ha publicado: 2 documentos sobre Recuperación del servicio; Comportamiento de quejas; Justicia percibida; 1 sobre Boca a boca electrónica; Reseñas en línea; Comunidad de marca; 1 sobre Colocación de marca; Publicidad de alimentos; Modelo de conocimiento de persuasión. Su artículo que ha alcanzado mayor impacto a la fecha tiene 378 citas "The influence and value of analogical thinking during new product ideation" (Dahl & Moreau, 2002) y el más reciente se denomina "Marketers Project Their Personal Preferences onto Consumers: Overcoming the Threat of Egocentric Decision Making" (Herzog et al, 2021 La Tabla 8, presenta 29 instituciones financiadoras destacadas, puntualizando en la cantidad total de artículos solventados durante el periodo 2016-2019 en las 5 revistas de acceso abierto de mayor índice SJR. La institución con mayor cantidad de registros es National Natural Science Foundation of China fundada en 1986, financió en el periodo de estudio 65 investigaciones.…”