On a sunny Saturday, I watched a classic movie titled To Be or Not to Be at the Stanford Theatre, a historic theater in Palo Alto. This movie experience felt like quiet therapy. I want to keep returning to this theatre for several reasons.
First, the analog ticketing gave me human connection. I received a red paper ticket at the tall glass booth, and another person inside cut it in half and handed it back. This mechanical process made me feel warmly connected.
Second, it was affordable in an expensive area. The ticket was $7, which is cheaper than a typical restaurant tip, and a small popcorn was only $1.50. In a place like Palo Alto where everything feels expensive, this low price made me feel comfortable.
Third, and most important, was the atmosphere. Most of the audience were senior couples, quietly watching the movie. Nobody used smartphones and nobody spoke loudly. I did not interact with them, but I felt comfort simply being near them. This calm environment helped me slow down my thoughts that dynamic AI talks never could. Although we often study seniors, we know little about how we feel when quietly sharing space with seniors. Perhaps, we enjoy being near them, watching them chat softly and walk slowly.
Independent theaters like the Stanford Theatre may represent the future of cinema. Multiplexes continue to be positioned as destinations for young couples, but moviegoers are turning away from them. Instead of focusing on couples looking for extraordinary experience, theaters should become places for individuals seeking quiet and reflection.
Previous research has shown that trait concepts and stereotypes become active automatically in the presence of relevant behavior or stereotyped-group features. Through the use of the same priming procedures as in previous impression formation research, Experiment 1 showed that participants whose concept of rudeness was primed interrupted the experimenter more quickly and frequently than did participants primed with polite-related stimuli. In Experiment 2, participants for whom an elderly stereotype was primed walked more slowly down the hallway when leaving the experiment than did control participants, consistent with the content of that stereotype. In Experiment 3, participants for whom the African American stereotype was primed subliminally reacted with more hostility to a vexatious request of the experimenter. Implications of this automatic behavior priming effect for self-fulfilling prophecies are discussed, as is whether social behavior is necessarily mediated by conscious choice processes.
“…We constructed two versions of the scrambled sentence task: one elderly prime version, which contained words related to the elderly stereotype, and another, neutral version. For the elderly prime version, the critical stimuli were worried, Florida, old, lonely, grey, selfishly, careful, sentimental, wise, stubborn, courteous, bingo, withdraw, forgetful, retired, wrinkle, rigid, traditional, bitter, obedient, conservative, knits, dependent, ancient, helpless, gullible, cautious, and alone… In the neutral version, the elderly prime words were replaced with the words unrelated to the elderly stereotype (e.g., thirsty, clean, private).”
“…Participants in the elderly priming condition (M = 8.28 s) had a slower walking speed compared to participants in the neutral priming condition (M= 7.30 s), t(2S) = 2.86,p< .01, as predicted…”
“…Thus, our results are in harmony with those of Carver et al. (1983), who advanced a “behavioral schema” model as an explanation for modeling effects. According to the behavioral schema model, the perceptual and actional representations of the same type of behavior share many features in common and thus develop strong connections. As a result, if one has just perceived another person acting in a generous or an aggressive way, for example, one’s behavioral schema for generosity or aggression is activated and accessible, and so one is more likely to behave that way oneself in subsequent situations for which generosity or aggression is a relevant response.“
During this opportunity, I shared my research on green consumption conducted with Bohee Jung (Jung & Joo, 2021). We borrowed the concept of choice–preference inconsistency from consumer behavior research to test whether consumers over-choose green options even when they do not evaluate them highly.
We found that while 76% chose the green option, only 49% actually rated it more favorably. A similar gap can be seen in real-world cases like the hype around Starbucks plastic reusable cups. Although companies are often accused of greenwashing, consumers themselves contribute by over-choosing green products they do not fully use.
In the past, researchers focusing on environmentally friendly consumption have devoted attention to the intention–action gap, suggesting that consumers have positive attitudes toward an environmentally friendly product even though they are not willing to buy it. In the present study, we borrow insights from the behavioral decision making literature on preference reversal to introduce an opposite phenomenon—that is, consumers buying an environmentally friendly product even though they do not evaluate it highly. We further rely on the research on goals to hypothesize that choice–evaluation discrepancies disappear when consumers pursue an environmentally friendly goal. A two (Mode: Choice vs. Evaluation) by three (Goal: Control vs. Quality vs. Environmentally friendly) between-subjects experimental design was used to test the proposed hypotheses. Our findings obtained from 165 undergraduate students in Korea showed that, first, 76% of the participants chose an environmentally friendly cosmetic product whereas only 49% of the participants ranked it higher than a competing product, and, second, when participants read the sentence “You are now buying one of the two compact foundations in order to minimize the waste of buying new foundations,” the discrepancy disappeared (64% vs. 55%). Our experimental findings advance academic discussions of green consumption and the choice–evaluation discrepancy and have practical implications for eco-friendly marketing.
My presentation focused on an ongoing collaborative research project with Nayoung Yoon at Aalto University and Wonseok Choi at Project Rent. Nayoung contributes perspectives of brand managers and consumers and Wonseok provides practical knowledge gained from launching over 200 pop-up stores throughout Seoul.
The lecture began with three landmark cases including Simmons Grocery Store. Following this, I presented four recent pop-up stores operated by Project Rent, each carefully designed around unique goals. Among them was the Ghana Chocolate House, an innovative pop-up store reshaping brand perception.
The audience paid attention to not only cases but also numbers. To illustrate this, I shared preliminary findings from data we collected during July 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in Seoul. The graph shows daily visitor counts for two pop-up stores, a ham and beer pop-up (solid line) and a fashion pop-up (dotted line), alongside daily COVID-19 case numbers (green line). During pandemic restrictions, the food and beverage pop-up consistently attracted more visitors than the fashion pop-up when operating. These findings, highlighting the appeal of experiential consumption, were presented by Nayoung in 2024.
We plan to deepen our analysis and provide further insights into how brands can leverage pop-up stores.
By taking empirics-first research approach, we study the effect of product type and COVID-19 restrictions on pop-up store visits. This quasi-experimental study uses store traffic and store-entry ratios of four pop-up stores displaying different product types (i.e., experience goods or search goods) at varying times (before or after the COVID-19 restrictions). Our research shows that pop-up store visits were higher when a store displayed experience goods than search goods before the COVID-19 restrictions. However, the store visits to experience goods pop-up stores plummeted after the imposition of restrictions, higher than search goods, suggesting the restrictions’ stronger detrimental effect on experience goods. Our findings advance research on consumer behavior relating to pop-up store products and the impact of mobility restrictions on store visits.
At the recent O’Malley School of Business (OMSB) Seminar at Manhattan University, I shared our research on minimalist design. This collaborative work with Yooncheol Shin, then a graduate student at the Techno Design Graduate School at Kookmin University and now a UX researcher at the Customer Experience Center at Woori Bank, explores when simplicity enhances consumer preference, and when it backfires.
We conducted one lab experiment and one field experiment to test a key idea: not all design elements contribute equally to how consumers form their preferences.
We found that removing LESS diagnostic design elements (e.g., buttons for play, forward, or backward songs) from an MP3 player increased participants’ preference. However, removing HIGHLY diagnostic design elements (e.g., buttons for equalizer, foreign song translation, or T-base) did not produce the same effect.
Our findings challenge the widely accepted “less is more” mantra. By connecting design practice and marketing theory, we offer practical insights for UX designers and brand managers who want to simplify without losing impact.
Advertising needs to capture consumers’ attention in likable ways, and the visual complexity of advertising plays a central role in this regard. Yet ideas about visual complexity effects conflict, and objective measures of complexity are rare. The authors distinguish two types of visual complexity, differentiate them from the difficulty of comprehending advertising, and propose objective measures for each. Advertisements are visually complex when they contain dense perceptual features (“feature complexity”) and/or when they have an elaborate creative design (“design complexity”). An analysis of 249 advertisements that were tested with eye-tracking shows that, as the authors hypothesize, feature complexity hurts attention to the brand and attitude toward the ad, whereas design complexity helps attention to both the pictorial and the advertisement as a whole, its comprehensibility, and attitude toward the ad. This is important because design complexity is under direct control of the advertiser. The proposed measures can be readily adopted to assess the visual complexity of advertising, and the findings can be used to improve the stopping power of advertisements.
Stan’s Donut Shop in Santa Clara, California, has been making fresh, hand-made donuts since 1959. It is a favorite place for many people who love classic donuts.
During a recent early morning visit, the shop was crowded with customers. Many were talking to their family members over Airpods which donuts to buy.
The menu offers a wide variety of donuts at affordable prices: classic glazed donuts are priced at $1.75, old-fashioned donuts at $1.25, cinnamon rolls at $3.00, and coffee at $1.50, with refills for just 50 cents.
The shop’s nostalgic ambiance, coupled with the sight of donuts being freshly prepared, evokes a sense of nostalgia that resonates with many customers. This connection to the past, along with the affordability of the offerings, exemplifies why nostalgia marketing is effective at In-N-Out in Long Beach and Cafe Strada in UC Berkeley.
Most marketing and branding activities are essentially concerned with enchantment—the rendering of the ordinary into something special. To create enchantment, companies are increasingly marketing past-themed brands and products. Yet, there is little research about why and how such nostalgia marketing creates enchantment for consumers. Building on different modalities of nostalgia identified in sociological literature (reluctant nostalgia, progressive nostalgia, and playful nostalgia), we analyze the creation of enchantment through a longitudinal, qualitative, multi-method program of inquiry. We find three routes to enchantment grounded in different nostalgia modes: (1) re-instantiation (symbolic retrojection into a past), (2) re-enactment (reflexively informing the present with past-themed brands and practices), and (3) re-appropriation (ludic re-interpretation of the past). By unfolding the different ways in which marketers can press rewind to create enchantment, we discern important implications for theorizing and managing past-themed brands in terms of marketing strategy, targeting and positioning, brand experience design, and marketing communications.
Despite the popularity and high quality of machine-made products, handmade products have not disappeared, even in product categories in which machinal production is common. The authors present the first systematic set of studies exploring whether and how stated production mode (handmade vs. machine-made) affects product attractiveness. Four studies provide evidence for the existence of a positive handmade effect on product attractiveness. This effect is, to an important extent, driven by perceptions that handmade products symbolically “contain love.” The authors validate this love account by controlling for alternative value drivers of handmade production (effort, product quality, uniqueness, authenticity, and pride). The handmade effect is moderated by two factors that affect the value of love. Specifically, consumers indicate stronger purchase intentions for handmade than machine-made products when buying gifts for their loved ones but not for more distant gift recipients, and they pay more for handmade gifts when purchased to convey love than simply to acquire the best-performing product.
At Stanford University, the number of seminars available on campus is stunning. I chose to attend a few, and I noticed that many of them focus on artificial intelligence. From engineering to economics, finance, and supply chain management, AI is a topic of discussion across different fields.
Repeated exposure to the AI-focused discussions has sparked my curiosity about technology. As a psychological experiment demonstrated long ago, repeated exposure to unknown stimuli such as Chinese characters leads to more positive attitudes toward them. As I continue to attend these seminars, my interest in AI and emerging technologies-hallmarks of Silicon Valley-continues to grow.
Likewise, Stanford students, surrounded by ongoing discussions, are likely to develop greater interest and a more positive attitude toward AI and technologies. The campus environment fosters enthusiasm for a transformative field.
The hypothesis is offered that mere repeated exposure of the individual to a stimulus object enhances his attitude toward it. By “mere” exposure is meant a condition making the stimulus accessible to the individual’s perception. Support for the hypothesis consists of 4 types of evidence, presented and reviewed: (a) the correlation between affective connotation of words and word frequency; (b) the effect of experimentally manipulated frequency of exposure upon the affective connotation of nonsense words and symbols; (c) the correlation between word frequency and the attitude to their referents; (d) the effects of experimentally manipulated frequency of exposure on attitude. The relevance for the exposure-attitude hypothesis of the exploration theory and of the semantic satiation findings were examined.
Recently, Tim Hortons expanded into Korea. It successfully kept many core offerings including the most popular coffee called Double Double. However, the chain overlooked the importance of sugar, a key ingredient of coffee, running into some challenges with brand authenticity.
When I ordered my once favorite “a black coffee with two sugars” at a freshly opened store in Korea, I was served coffee with two Korean sugar packets. Unfortunately, they differ from the familiar Canadian sugars that are part of the authentic Tim Hortons experience. This seemingly minor change impacts the unique experience that loyal Tim Hortons customers like me expect.
Brands should consistently deliver on their promises to maintain authenticity (Schallehn et al. 2014). For global brands like Tim Hortons, preserving even the smallest elements of their identity is key. Deviations from established brand expectations—such as using different ingredients or local adaptation—can diminish consumer trust and loyalty, even if those changes seem insignificant.
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to develop a model of brand authenticity and analyze the antecedents and effects of the construct. Although there is no doubt about the relevance of authenticity in personal relationships, published research has yet not thoroughly explored the concept’s meaning in reference to brands.
Design/methodology/approach Based on socio-psychological attribution theories and grounding on the identity-based brand management approach, a causal model of brand authenticity is developed. The hypothesized relationships are analyzed using the partial-least-squares approach. The primary data are based on an online survey conducted in Germany (n = 600). The respondents were asked about fast-food and beer brands.
Findings The data show that brand authenticity positively impacts on brand trust. Furthermore, the key antecedents in the model (consistency, continuity and individuality of a brand) drive the perception of brand authenticity as hypothesized.
Research limitations/implications The model should be tested in further product categories and moderators should be integrated.
Originality/value The findings suggest that authenticity is perceived when a brand is consistent, continuous and individual in its behavior. Nevertheless, the empirical results indicate that the factor individuality has the lowest influence on perceived brand authenticity. This is an interesting finding, as being “unique” is commonly regarded as an important success factor in branding. Although the study’s findings confirm its relevancy, they relativize its importance: being consistent, meaning that a brand fulfills its brand promise at every brand-touch point, and being continuous, meaning that the brand promise reflects the essential core of the brand, are of major importance.
Objective: Impulse buying is a recognized phenomenon as consumers have abundant shopping opportunities. We investigate whether orderly space encourages consumers to buy impulsively and whether this relationship is moderated by self-construal. Specifically, we hypothesize that consumers show greater impulse buying intentions when space is orderly than disorderly. We also hypothesize that when interdependent self-construal is primed, the effect of orderly space on consumers’ increased impulse buying intentions will be attenuated. Background: Our hypotheses are based on the research about emotions that consumers experience while they shop in a retail store. When the store is orderly, consumers experience pleasure. In contrast, disorganized shelves, unsorted merchandise, and messy clothing racks evoke negative emotions. A recent study shows consumers’ positive emotional responses to a retail environment result in heightened impulse buying. Methods: Two experiments were carried out to test the two hypotheses. Experiment 1 employed a 2 (space order: orderly vs. disorderly) between-subjects design. Participants randomly received one of the two store images and were asked to indicate their impulse-buying intentions. Experiment 2 employed a 2 (space order: orderly vs. disorderly) × 2 (self-construal: independent vs. interdependent) between-subjects design. Participants were randomly given one of the two store images and one of the two self-construal priming tasks to measure their impulse buying intentions. Results: As hypothesized, Experiment 1 demonstrated that participants exerted stronger impulse-buying intentions in an orderly space. Experiment 2 also showed that when participants were primed by inter- dependent self-construal, their impulse buying intentions did not differ, regardless of whether the space was orderly. Implications: Our findings provide insights for offline store managers. To nudge visitors to buy impulsively, managers should organize their spaces orderly. However, the effect of space order on consumers’ impulse buying will disappear when consumers’ interdependent self-construal is activated. Our findings contribute to the academic research into the factors that lead consumers to buy impulsively.
Keywords
impulse buying, space order, self-construal, off-line store, sales
Many design practitioners aim to enhance the beauty of an existing product or develop novel products and services. However, market does not always pay off their effort. Carefully designed products often fail to attract consumers. What should designers do to enhance sales?
One solution is to borrow insights from behavioral economics. Studies show that behavioral economics can increase the adoption rate of newly designed products because it overcomes consumer resistance.
I was once invited by Palermo University in Argentina to share findings about the commercial impact of behavioral economics in the context of design. I shared my experimental findings about three Korean companies.
(1) Samsung’s printer would sell more if its ugly version is placed next to it because joint evaluation helps consumers consider aesthetics importantly,
(2) LG’s Styler would sell more if the clock in the store presents time in analog not in digital because doing so encourages consumers to think abstractly and creatively to appreciate the value of something new, and
(3) SK Telecom’s AI speaker would be used more often if it has a human feature and viewed as a foreigner or child because people become more tolerant about the mistakes of the AI speaker.
Anthropomorphism works. When a car has a human schema (e.g., smiley face), people evaluate it positively (Aggarwal and McGill 2007). When a garbage bin has a human message (e.g., “feed me”), people follow it (Ahn, Kim, Aggarwal 2013). When an AR speaker has eyes or when an instruction manual depicts it like a baby, people become generous about its malfunction (Park and Joo 2018).
Historically, an object was anthropomorphize in one of two ways. On one hand, designers add the parts of the human body such as eyes and arms to an inanimate object. For instance, a tip jar has a smiley face, two arms, and two legs. On the other hand, marketers add a phrase describing that the object behaves like a human being. For instance, a garbage bin eats food or a mobile phone becomes stupid.
Today, I noticed another way to anthropomorphize an object, which can be employed by artists. They do not add something to an inanimate object directly; instead they ask us to actively imagine that inanimate objects animate. This is well demonstrated by the artwork, Relatum – The Kiss (2023) by Lee Ufan. We imagine two stones are two people and they are kissing each other.
Kukje Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of Lee Ufan on view from April 4 to May 28, 2023. Lee titles all his scultures Relatum and often provides subtitles to hint possible associations without giving a clear interpretation. Relatum signifies a relation that is different from a readily definable term, relationship, but one that explores the artist’s interest in how individual elements of a work are in a fluid relationship. In this way, the viewer, who directly intervenes in the space of the work as a relatum-along with factors such as the stone representing nature and the steel plate representing industrial society-feels a part of the conversation between the two objects or is led to reflect on the idea of co-presence by observing their conversation.
Lee employes an anthropomorphic metaphor in Relatum – The Kiss (2023), capturing a moment of encounter. As can be inferred by its subtitle, two stones are making a point of encounter as if they are kissing, while two individual chains surrounding them overlap and cross each other, thereby creating a point of intersection. The center of the cirucualr chians leading toward the position of each stone evokes a strong sense of motion…
