We'll Be Honest, This Won't Be the Best Article You'll Ever Read: The Use of Dispreferred Markers in Word-of-Mouth Communication

Consumers value word-of-mouth communications in large part because customer reviews are more likely to include negative information about a product or service than are communications originating from the marketer. Despite the fact that negative information is frequently valued by those receiving it, baldly declaring negative information may come with social costs to both communicator and receiver. For this reason, communicators sometimes soften pronouncements of bad news by couching them in dispreferred markers, including phrases such as, "I'll be honest," "God bless it," or "I don't want to be mean, but ..." The present work identified and tested a phenomenon termed the dispreferred marker effect, in which consumers evaluate communicators who use dispreferred markers as more credible and likable than communicators who assert the same information without dispreferred markers. The dispreferred marker effect can spill over to evaluations of the product being reviewed, increasing willingness to pay and influencing evaluations of the credibility and likability of the evaluated product's personality.

When Identity Marketing Backfires: Consumer Agency in Identity Expression

Consumers prefer brands positioned around identities they possess. Accordingly, the consumer identity literature emphasizes the importance of a clear fit between brands and target identities, suggesting that identity marketing that explicitly links brands to consumer identity should be most effective. In contrast, the authors demonstrate that explicit identity-marketing messages can backfire. Messages that explicitly connect a particular brand to consumer identity increase the salience of external determinants of behavior, reducing consumer perceptions of agency in identity expression. Hence, compared to messages that merely reference consumer identity, messages that explicitly define identity expression reduce purchase likelihood, despite more clearly conveying identity relevance. These findings highlight the need to consider consumer need for agency in addition to their drive for self-definition and expression through consumption, offering a foundation to examine both the risks and the rewards of identity marketing.  

Judging a Part by the Size of Its Whole: The Category Size Bias in Probability Judgments

Whereas prior research has found that consumer probability judgments are sensitive to the number of categories into which a set of possible outcomes is grouped, categorization can also bias predictions when the number of categories is fixed. Specifically, the experiments document a category size bias in which consumers perceive an outcome as more likely to occur when it is categorized with many rather than few alternative possibilities, even when the grouping criterion is irrelevant and the objective probability of each outcome is identical. For example, consumers irrationally predicted being more likely to win a lottery if their ticket color matched many (vs. few) of the other gamblers' tickets -- and wagered nearly 25% more as a result. Consumer perceptions of risk and probability are influenced not only by the number of categories into which possible outcomes are classified but also by category size.