Blinding me with science
If your product is designed for pleasure, you may not want to discuss the science behind it
From Doc Brown to Walter White to Dr. Hubert Farnsworth, scientists tend to show up in popular culture as, yes, brilliant — but also goofy, amoral, immoral, or just plain weird.
We have a certain narrative in our minds about who scientists are and what science is, and that affects how we interpret science claims in marketing communication.
In a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, Rebecca Reczek, Professor of Marketing at The Ohio State University, and her collaborators Aviva Philipp-Muller and John Costello, investigated the effect of science claims on consumer purchase intent.
In this Q&A, Dr. Reczek discusses the effect on pleasurable products versus practical products, how certain interventions can sway consumers, and the broader implications for marketers.
(The responses below are lightly edited for brevity.)
James Forr: Could you start by giving me a 30,000-foot overview of the big insights you found?
Rebecca Reczek: What we found is that when a product is designed for practical purposes, to meet utilitarian needs, then science can enhance purchase intentions. But when the product is more about pleasure, hedonic needs, then science can have a backfire effect that reduces purchase intentions.
It’s driven by people’s lay theories about science. A lay theory is someone’s beliefs about the world. They don’t necessarily have to be true. Essentially, people view science as cold, yet competent. So there is a mismatch between feeling science is cold and products that are about pleasure. We don’t want science mixed with our pleasure. Basically, it feels strange, like something isn’t quite right there.
JF: In your article you discussed about 10 different experiments you ran. What were a couple of the more interesting ones?
RR: We gave undergraduate students a real chocolate chip cookie to consume. In one condition, we told them that one of the options, Option A, has a “luscious, chocolatey taste.” In the other condition we said it was, “scientifically developed to have luscious chocolatey taste.” We found that saying the taste came from science reduced interest in that cookie by about 30 percent.
In another experiment we described a body wash as either hedonic or utilitarian — focusing on the body wash having a creamy lather that immerses your senses in an indulgent experience versus focusing on how the body wash was designed to kill odor-causing bacteria. We found that when we focus on the indulgent lather, science reduced purchase intentions. But for the bacteria-killing body wash, the opposite happens. Science actually increases purchase intentions. That is when we want science because it is for a practical purpose.
We found the same thing with a personal lubricant that is positioned either as enhancing sexual pleasure or preventing unwanted pregnancy. When we pair science with sexual pleasure, that turns people off. They are less likely to buy it. But the opposite is true for preventing unwanted pregnancy — then science increases purchase intentions because you want the competency of science there.
JF: You mentioned that the reason for this is that people perceive science and scientists as cold, which sounds logical, but how do you know for certain that is the reason?
RR: We asked the general population whether they agree with the idea that science is cold, yet competent. And we found that a large portion of the population does view science that way. But we found that people who don’t have the belief that science is cold actually don’t show the backfire effect. But about 70 percent of our sample did show the backfire effect.
We also found that people who work in a STEM industry also don’t show the backfire effect. That is because they are less likely to stereotype science and scientists.
JF: There is probably no one who knows the answer to this, but I will ask you to speculate. In the 1950s and ’60s, science was kind of cool. You had TV shows like The Jetsons and Star Trek, among others, that painted a fantastic picture of what the future was going to look like and science was behind that. Everyone was rooting for NASA. Individual scientists were frequently profiled and celebrated in popular news magazines. Today, you can’t even get a lot of people to take a vaccine because of paranoia about science. If you had done this study at a different point in history, do you think the results would have been different or not?
RR: They absolutely could have been. A lay theory is just people’s beliefs about the way the world works. But where do they come from? Sometimes they come from personal experiences. It’s speculation, but things like people’s experience in high school dissecting a frog — for some people that is a traumatic experience that feels cold and heartless. If you look at science fiction, we have these tropes about the mad scientist who cares more about furthering their scientific aims than they do about people. So we get these ideas into our heads about what science is.
The reality is that science is often done very collaboratively. It actually can be quite warm and personal relationships matter a great deal. But if you are not inside a lab, you are not thinking about the very human relationships that often drive scientific collaboration.
So, absolutely, it is, to some extent, a product of our time. I will also add that these studies were done with American participants. It is possible that people in other cultures don’t show this same lay belief.
JF: So, if you are a brand, and you have a hedonic product, and you want to talk a little bit about the science behind it, does this suggest that maybe you also need to do a little bit of marketing, not just of your brand, but also of scientists?
RR: I think that is a possibility, but that’s not the intervention that we tested. The intervention that we tested was more of an education about the necessity of science.
We had people read a short excerpt that was supposedly on a brand’s website about the necessity of a science for baking. It was an article titled “Baking is Chemistry.” We had people read this article first, before exposure to a science claim for a hedonic cookie. And we found that when people first read that article versus a control article that didn’t talk about the need for science they no longer show the backfire effect.
So, my advice to a brand marketing a hedonic product would be to not talk about scientific development unless you’re also going to make clear to consumers why the science was needed.
JF: In preparing for this Q&A, I came across a brand called Sweet Science ice cream. Their website has these images of delicious looking ice cream in these one-pint containers. And on the container it says, “all-natural ingredients,” and then it has the flavor indicated in a box like you would see on the periodic table. There is a V for vanilla, a C for chocolate, a BBS for blackberry sorbet.
I thought on one hand, boy, this company’s really gonna strike out based on what your research said. On the other hand, although I am not an expert on ice cream positioning, I don’t think there are many other brands in the category talking this way. So, is it possible that, while this brand probably is not ever going to become a market leader, it might appeal to a big enough niche that it could find a way forward just because it is zigging when every other brand is zagging?
RR: Yeah, that’s possible. My husband is an organic chemist. He would be part of that niche audience. There are a few brands out there that are using liquid nitrogen to make ice cream. And they’re arguing that the science is part of the product creation. So, they’re doing more like what we did in our cookie study. If you make the science part of the products, and people really see the science as integral to the product creation, then you wouldn’t necessarily get the backfire effect.
JF: Let’s say you’re marketing a cookie. Besides not wanting to literally use the word “science” and associate that with your brand, does your research suggest other cues that should be avoided in advertising or in packaging, or even in point of sale displays?
RR: We always explicitly used the word “science” in our experiments. What I can’t say for sure, from our empirical work, is whether you would get the same backfire effect, if you were just showing a lab, for example. But I strongly suspect you would.
But we did find that it’s specific to science. In another study, we tested what happens if you just say the product went through a development process. Can you just not talk about development for hedonic products? And that’s not the case. We only get the backfire effect if it’s a scientific development process. Even talking about “rigor” doesn’t produce the same backfire effect. The lay theory is specifically about “science.” It’s not just that we don’t want to hear about development for hedonic products. That’s not the case. It really is, specifically, we don’t want it to be linked to science.
JF: Are there any other implications for marketers?
RR: I think there are broader implications when we think about trying to persuade people to do things with science, like you mentioned with vaccines. I have not tested this, but I wonder if this lay theory has implications for when we have science-backed reasons for wanting people to do things like getting vaccines and wearing masks? Are we better off not invoking the science, even when the science is what is actually driving the recommendation? Like, “Science says wear the mask to protect your loved ones” — that is a similar mismatch to what we have in our studies where science is paired with something that’s very much about warmth and love.
“It’s not just that we don’t want to hear about development for hedonic products. It really is, specifically, we don’t want it to be linked to science.”
JF: Say you have a brand, that is just clearly artificial, like Oreos. Nobody imagines that there’s a lot of real, natural ingredients in an Oreo. Also, nobody cares because they taste so good. But you know darn well that sometime in the last 20 or 30 years, there’s been some executive who’s had the idea, “Hey, let’s talk about the natural, good-for-you ingredients in our Oreos.” Looking at the other side of it, if you have an artificial, fake product, and you push the naturalness too heavily, is it possible that you are also going to have a kind of similar kind of backfire effect?
RR: There is actually a real-world example of this. In 2014, Chobani yogurt did a campaign called “#howmatters” and one of the things they said was, “Nature got us to 100 calories, not scientists” And scientists got really mad because there’s actually a lot of science in the development of consumer packaged goods. I don’t know if the general public necessarily responded negatively. But it ended up being a little bit of a PR issue for Chobani because people on Twitter were very publicly ridiculing them. I think they even offered free yogurt to scientists.
As for the general public — maybe. The psychological name for the mechanism that’s causing the backfire effect is that it feels “disfluent.” It’s just not consistent with our expectations. So any time you have a mismatch, you could get a similar type of disfluency backfire effect.
James Forr is Head of Insights at Olson Zaltman.
