Why we buy what others buy : The role of product popularity in consumer decision making

Abstract

Research on social influences often distinguishes between social and quality incentives to ascribe meaning to the value that popularity conveys. Neurological knowledge on this distinction is rather limited. The current research examines the neural correlates of those routes through which popularity exerts its effect on consumer preferences and behaviour. This research reports the results of an fMRI experiment in which consumers evaluated a large set of food products from three perspectives, each with a specific focus; a normal focus, a focus on social aspects, and a focus on quality. We show that for consumers with a social (vs. normal) focus, popularity leads to activity in brain regions that compute social value which positively interacts with regions that compute general reward value. The combined activation positively mediates the effect of popularity on preference. For consumers who hold a quality (vs. normal) focus, popularity preferences, which suggests an automatic link between popularity and quality. The neural pattern is reflected in the pattern of results from an additional behavioural task. Together, these results provide the first neurological evidence that a single popularity cue can in different ways, influence the value derived from product popularity.