Persuasive Advertising - J. Scott Armstrong [96]
Now look what happens for products that are relatively well known. Three experiments presented alternative ads to 632 university students, two involving imagining vacations and one a restaurant. Visualizing instructions in a print ad (“Visualize yourself here” for the vacation) led those who did well at visualizing the experience to have higher purchase intentions than an ad that did not ask people to visualize themselves. But the results were reversed for those who did not do well at visualizing the product experience (Petrova and Cialdini 2005).
In another experiment for a well-known product, instructions to imagine were given to 377 subjects (e.g., “Just imagine yourself behind the wheel of the 1992 Integra”). They led to slightly lower intentions to purchase (Burns, Biswas, and Babin 1993).
The next principle extends imagining satisfaction from thinking about satisfaction prior to a choice to encouraging people to think about satisfaction as they use a product.
A British Airways advertising campaign invited people to try its business class. Consumers who were not satisfied would receive free coach tickets for another trip. Was that a good idea?
5.11.3. Do not invite customers to evaluate their satisfaction while using a product
When consumers expect to report about their satisfaction with a product or service, they adopt a critical attitude. They search for things that are wrong. This leads them to have a less enjoyable experience. It also leads to less satisfaction for the producers. Thus, the British Air ad would be expected to harm customer satisfaction and reduce the morale of the service providers.
Given the evidence to date, the use of pre-announced satisfaction surveys is detrimental. In addition to harming the satisfaction of sellers and buyers, they discourage the collection of useful diagnostic information.
So why are they used? The primary reason is social proof. Organizations use them because other organizations use them. Furthermore, experience does not enable people to tell whether they help or hurt. Experimental evidence, however, shows that pre-announced or expected satisfaction surveys are harmful.
This principle is widely violated by hotels, automobile dealerships, telephone companies, stock brokers, and other firms that routinely use preannounced satisfaction surveys. Universities have long used them in an attempt to assess student satisfaction. However they reduce student and teacher satisfaction, harm learning, and increase administrative costs (Armstrong 2004).
A sensible approach is to ask people to think about positive experiences as they use a product or service, as was done, for example, by the Comfort Suites hotel chain in 2009. In its “be a dazzle detective” campaign, it encouraged visitors to report on cases of staff members “doing something right.” Imagine how this would affect the behavior of employees.
Evidence on the effects of preannounced satisfaction surveys
Five field experiments showed that preannounced (or expected) satisfaction surveys harmed satisfaction. Experiments were conducted with a computer company, an electric utility, a supermarket, a drug store, a magazine, and an electronic equipment company. Some customers, randomly assigned, were told that they would be asked later about their satisfaction with the service, while others were not informed about the satisfaction survey. In a follow-up satisfaction survey, those in the pre-announced survey group were much less satisfied than those who had not expected to receive a satisfaction survey. People in the pre-announced group were looking for reasons to be dissatisfied— and they found them (Ofir and Simonson 2001).
A lab experiment demonstrated that preannounced (or expected) satisfaction surveys harmed satisfaction and reduced useful feedback. A role-playing experiment of a banking service was used to evaluate responses