Marketing and Placebos Flashcards
What is the paper related to Marketing and Placebos?
Placebo effects of Marketing Actions: Consumers May get what they pay for? by Shiv, Carmon & Ariely (2005).
What is the paper about?
Its about the placebo effects of price. Price affects expectation of efficacy( effectiveness)
And expectation of efficacy affects efficacy.
What do we geniuely say about the perfection the efficacy of lower priced items?
What do we say about brand labels versus unlabelled?
Lower price = low quality.
Branded label > unlabelled.
So we observe placebo effects in medicine, explain how?
Credible placebos can help cure physical and mental illness this is because beliefs and expectations about the treatment can yield to real changes in health
What is a potential reasoning why placebo effects work in medicine?
Conditioning effect - always felt better after treatment so subconsciously also expect to get better with placebo. ( e.g. when i have taken pills in the past it has worked, so it should work next time)
EXPLAIN THIS
What are other aspects of Extrinsic aspects?
Brand name
What is the purpose of teaching evaluations and what is the correlation between TE and learning?
Measure what people are learning.
Evidence of very weak or negative correlation between TE and learning this is because students learn from being challenged, from solving problems themselves rather than being told how to solve them but makes them feel stupid and frustrated.
Thus good teachers tend to receive bad TE’s.
Lets look at one of the preliminary experiments in the paper from Shiv, Carmon & Ariely (2005).
So there was an Energy drink Twinlab Ultra Fuel, 28 subjects who exercise > 3 times/week
Consumed drink before and during workout
Group 1: were told drink was purchased at regular price ($2.89)
Group 2: were told drink was purchased at discount price ( $0.89)
The results
Subjects were asked whether price of drink affected workout, what was the response and what does this show( key finding)
1) Nobody said yes
2) Marketing actions, such as price discounts or price in itself lead to a placebo effect, which affects perception of efficacy and actual efficacy in itself.
Now lets look at experiment 1, where the purpose was for subjects to elaborate on their expectations ( placebo effect) should increase the strength of expectations and hence the (negative) placebo effect of reduced price.
So subjects bought and consumed soBe Adrenaline Rush (‘increases mental acuity’) some at $1.89 and others at $0.89.
Group 1 were asked to elaborate on expectations by rating (1 to 7) the efficacy of drink before task
Group 2: No rating
Then solved puzzles.
After task, they were both asked ‘How effective was SoBe at improving puzzle solving performance?’ ( 1 to 7)
They also feel in questionnaire, about Gender, whether they had consumed before and so on
Control group ( no drink) solved 9.1 puzzles on average.
So we want to measure number of solved puzzles and whether expectancies lead to placebo effect.
The treatment groups with the drink didn’t solve more than 9.1 puzzles on average, so there wasn’t a positive placebo effect of the drink but there are differences in the the 4 conditions we have ( low price vs high price groups and low expectancy vs high expectancy). EFFECT WE OBSERVE IS BECAUSE OF PRICE NO POSITIVE PLACEBO EFFECT. - KEY.
The bars on the right ( high expectancy when asked the question before about expectation) show a big difference between discount price and full price. THEY GAVE A RATING TO SOBE FULL PRICE OF 4.3 COMPARED TO 3.5 DISCOUNT CONDITION
Whereas those bars on the left ( those who were not asked to give rating before solving puzzles, the difference is less.
Thus the expectation of the performance of the drink have a big effect on perceived efficacy and actually efficacy
What else did we find out about for experiment 1?
Those who consumed SoBe the day before the experiment ( might be regular consumers) solved more puzzles than those who never had the drink 8.8 vs 7.7
What is the aim of experiment 2?
If we make people think about the association between price and quality, then people will realise it doesn’t make sense, as its the same drink, so if we draw peoples attention to this, then the placebo effect should weaken
What other explanations did they want to rule out in experiment 2?
1) we found that those who pay higher price solve more puzzles but why is that, other than placebo effect of price, maybe they worked harder because they paid more ( cognitive dissonance)
2) or maybe those who paid low price was distracted by the idea that they got a bargain and therefore didn’t solve many puzzles.
So in experiment 2
Group 1 : High salience ( focused on price) were told ‘Given the price i was charged for SoBe, i feel that SoBe is very bad (1) / very good (7) at improving mental performance
Group 2 : Low salience, given the same sentence without the price part( same as in experiment 1)
What do we find?
In the high salience group the placebo effect is eliminated because on average they solve same amount of puzzles.
The group where the attention was not drawn to price ( Low price - Effiacy Salience, the high price group solves more puzzles than low price group ( similar results to experiment 1, low-expectancy strength, consistent with the placebo effect of price discounts)
With experiment 2 what is an important thing to note about the control group?
The control group had self effiacy beliefs which are high whereas treatment group have price related beliefs.
Method of experiment 3
2 groups who get a message beforehand that the drink can significantly improve mental functioning and the other group is told that it can slightly improve mental functioning. They do the puzzle task with full prize and discounted.
Explain results
The advertising message about the efficacy strengthens response expectancies and increased number of puzzles solved for both regular and discounted price in comparison to control group. HENCE WE HAVE A DESIRABLE PLACEBO EFFECT.
Whereas with the Low expectancy strength group ( slightly improve mental functioning, the number of puzzles solved was lower in the reduced price condition and the number of puzzles solved in the regular price was lower than in the control condition = Undesirable placebo effect.
a) Would you expect that regular homeopathy users benefit more from homeopathic treatment than first-time users? Justify your answer using evidence from the Shiv et al. (2005) paper. b) Do you think regular users experienced a greater effect the first time they
used the preparation or on subsequent occasions? Why?
