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we're speaking today with wharton marketing professor Barbara Kahn about her new paper anticipation of
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future variety reduces satiation from current experiences which is essentially about marketing the future to improve
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the present thanks for joining us sure I pledge it did you give you summary of your of your research well
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what the research shows is that if you anticipate consuming future variety or a variety of things in the future you will
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satiate slowly on what you're consuming now so this sort of sounds like the reason why we all over eat at a buffet
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well except overeating is consumption and this is about eating the same thing over time how fast do you get bored with
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it or how fast you stay see I associate with it and the reason it's interesting
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and marketers is of course marketers want you to eat is much more to consume as much as possible of their product but
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the problem is and this is not just for food it could be for music or for anything else that you consume over time
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the problem is when you consume a lot over time you get bored or satiated so is there a way to reduce the boredom so
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that you'll enjoy what you're consuming for a longer period of time and what we
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found was that some of that boredom Association is cognitive it's not all physical that you're literally satiating
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on it so that if we can encourage you to think about something in the future that's related to what you're consuming
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now that will offer more variety then you'll satiate slowly more slowly so in
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your in your paper in the column about your paper you introduce the example of yogurt could you explain that one
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because I think that helps to sort of clarify this yeah so and here's my kind
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of where the managerial implications so to speak could say say you're you're
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eating vanilla yogurt every single day for lunch for a week two weeks three weeks you can imagine over time you get
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bored with vanilla yogurt so what can we do to make you less bored well if you knew you went to Costco or BJ's or some
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warehouse and buy the whole that holds the pallet of yogurt and it was all different flavors or some flavor
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different from vanilla and you know in the future you would consume that it wouldn't make you satiate slow more
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slowly with the vanilla yo you're eating overtime today and that's the idea okay so what are the
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implications and for retailers like Costco for example well it says that selling a variety of things has it
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benefit over and above what you might think just having the variety in the refrigerator will make the enjoyment of
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a single flavor more pleasurable okay and what would you say was the biggest surprise that came out of this research
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for you well we've always found a lot about anticipation so a lot of past research has shown that you should savor
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you know the anticipation of something good so there's an advantage of planning
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for vacation in fact or a wedding or something that's really fun you might actually enjoy the anticipation of the
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event more than the event itself so that's something that's been shown before but what's different about this
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research is that we show that anticipating variety in the future affects your current consumption and
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that's different and that's somewhat surprising because you wouldn't think
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just thinking about something in the future could affect how you're enjoying
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something today one of the other interesting examples you've brought up in your column that appeared in the AMA
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about this piece the idea that maybe it's not always the best thing to keep say a gift a surprise gift from a
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significant other can you explain that keep it a secret so the point is is people can anticipate something that's
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going to happen in the future it not only do you savor you know the excitement of the future but it also can
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affect your current consumption and so that's a little counterintuitive for example if someone's going to give
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someone to see a surprise vacation knowing about it earlier helps you to anticipate that and actually enjoy
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something in the present correct right right so you know you're going to have a
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lot of varied activities you're going to go skiing and you know mountain climbing
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or whatever you're going to do in the future so maybe you won't be as bored
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with what you're doing right now there's all sorts of implications for this what
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are you going to look at next do you think well it's interesting to think about how consuming variety can affect
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things besides actual utility you have for the variety so one of the projects I'm working on with a doctoral student
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at Drexel University actually is how in a consuming variety can you feel less guilty or more fulfilled
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when you're in a self-regulatory mode which means when you're trying to like
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control your way be more healthy sometimes using variety is a cue for doing more of a good thing or less of a
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bad thing can alleviate guilt or credit and that's kind of an interesting thing
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that variety in and of itself can affect these other kinds of feelings or emotions great well thanks so much for
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joining us today it is very interesting thank you for more insight from knowledge of Wharton please visit
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