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Cait Lamberton: Dignity always comes
in second. It comes in second to the objective value that you get
from your interaction with a
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firm. But what falls way down
the list are the things that we talk about all the time, like
whether the firm is sustainable,
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whether the firm aligns with my
political values. Dan Loney: Welcome to The Ripple Effect,
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the podcast that takes you on a journey through the minds of
Wharton faculty. I'm your host,
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Dan Loney. And in each episode,
we'll be diving deep into the inspiration behind the
groundbreaking research that
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Wharton professors have
conducted, and exploring how their findings resonate with the
world today. Well, it seems like
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brands are in a bit of a unique
time right now, where they're being called on by their
consumers, and in many cases
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the public at large, to make a
positive impact on society. Not that they haven't done it
before, but maybe even more so
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now here in this time and age.
But according to a new book, co-authored by our next guest,
companies may not truly
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understand about how to go about
in that process. Great to be joined here by Cait Lamberton,
who's a Professor of Marketing
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here at the Wharton School. The
book, by the way, is titled <i>Marketplace Dignity:
Transforming How We Engage With</i>
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<i>Customers Across Their Journey</i>,
which by the way, is published
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by Wharton School Press. Cait,
great to talk to you. Thanks very much for joining us today.
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So happy to be here. I guess let's start out with
what is happening, and why it's
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happening, and why this issue of
marketplace dignity is so important right now. There are a lot of large-scale
factors that make this
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particularly salient to people.
So we know that when people, for example, feel that their choice
is constrained in the
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marketplace, they're going to do
everything they can to get it back. If they feel that they are
not treated fairly compared to
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others, they're going to do
everything they can to restore that. And because the
marketplace is so transparent
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right now, it's easy to know
whether somebody is getting something better than you. And
the likelihood is they're gonna
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brag about it on social media.
So people become very sensitive to disparate treatment, to a loss
of agency, and perhaps even to a
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loss of voice, because we live in
a marketplace where now everyone has a megaphone. If everyone has
a megaphone, you're just
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shouting with everyone else.
And so I'm sure we'll talk about this later. But when those three
things are threatened, when your
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agency and your voice and your
sense of fairness are threatened, it's absolutely
reasonable to want to restore
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them.
- And so how much— - Yeah, go ahead. How much of a challenge is it
for companies right now to be
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able to kind of be in this mix?
Because I would think there are elements of this that they've
probably dealt with in the past.
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But having all of them together
kind of adds to the— adds to the pressure that they have to
deal with.
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Yeah. I think it is a uniquely
challenging time in some senses, but they also have new tools to
address them, if they want to do
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it. And I think— you know, it's
interesting. If you— if you Google something like "Which
companies treat— treat their
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employees or the customers with
dignity," you'll find a lot of reports about single issues. So
they'll say, "Okay, this is a
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company that supports people in
the LGBTQ community." "This is a company that is, you know, a
strong ally for another group."
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"This is a company that affirms
older employees." But as a systematic approach, I don't
think— I don't think we actually
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see that very often. So they
have— you have multi-level threats to dignity, but then
they tend to have these sort of
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ad hoc responses. And I think
that they do have— yes, it's a unique challenge. But there's
also a unique set of
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opportunities that they can take
advantage of. You talked about that megaphone
that— that a lot of consumers
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have. I'm guessing part of that
takes shape in the form of social media, but obviously
other platforms that are out
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there as well. Yeah, I mean, I think social
media is the dominant platform right now. But that doesn't mean
that consumers don't sometimes
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at least feel empowered to grab
the megaphone in person, to— to take the attention that they
want to. And it's— again, it's a
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fundamental human need to feel
heard and seen. And the more frustrated people become, the
more they're going to find a way
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to— to force you to see them and
force you to hear them. Is this becoming kind of a "must-
have" more so than a "potentially-
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have" for a lot of companies? That
you have to have this thought process, this kind of formula in
your mix?
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I think that if they don't, they—
they're in danger. And I think they're missing out on a
differentiator. And to the extent
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that any differentiator is a
"must have", then yes. And I— I actually think it's far more
important than, for example,
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being in the right place on
social issues. Those things are going to move around. That's
going to continually change. And
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a company that is chasing
whatever's popular socially is gonna have a hard time. But what
we argue in the book is that
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this is a matter of how you
structure the experience. And it's not just about being nice,
and it's not just about being
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liberal or conservative or
somewhere in the middle. It's just about the decisions you
make in the architecture of your
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experience. And those are— those
are— you know, you're gonna make the decisions anyway. It's a
matter of whether you make them
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taking dignity into account or
not. What we found in some data is that we asked consumers to
rank the importance of different
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things that they can experience
in their interactions with a firm. Dignity always comes in
second. It comes in second to
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the objective value that you get
from your interaction with a firm. But what falls way down
the list are the things that we
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talk about all the time, like
whether the firm is sustainable, whether the firm aligns with my
political values. What's second is
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whether I'm treated with
respect, and that comes up in the data over and over and over
again.
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And so for the company, I guess,
because the mindset of each individual consumer can be
different, a lot of the
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companies have to be prepared
for a variety of options along the way, don't they, as well?
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Well, there's more uniformity on some
of this than you might think. I think that— that idiosyncratic
individual preferences take us
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back to things like political
ideology, or social issues. And that's— that is— that's a whole
different topic that's quite
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challenging to handle in and of
itself. But what we find in our data is that those three things,
everybody values them. In
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different contexts, to a different
extent. But people want to feel some control over what's
happening to them. And that's
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pretty universal. They like to
make choices. Now, of course, you have to think about how to
craft that so that people make
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choices that are helpful. But
everybody likes— nobody likes to feel trapped. No one likes
feeling trapped. It's just not—
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it doesn't happen. People like
to feel seen and heard, or the converse of that is they like to
choose when to be seen and
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heard. - Right.
That's a universal preference. And— and we learn— one of the earliest things we
learned developmentally is that
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we like things to be fair. You
know, "That kid has a toy, and I don't have a toy. And that's not
fair. And I'm not okay with it."
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So, in a way, I think we would
argue that designing for dignity is a much safer approach than,
"Let's give everyone exactly what
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they want, and try to be all
things to all people." You're not going to get that right. But I
think you can get this right at
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a scalable level. But off of what you mentioned a
moment ago, that's why the
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component of this being the
entire journey of a consumer plays so much into the process
here, doesn't it?
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It does. Because if you only do it in
one part, you look very inauthentic. Right? So, "Oh,
congratulations, you're— you're
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gonna allow a lot of dignity
before the consumer makes a decision." So they come into your
store and you do something
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really respectful, like give
them decompression space, don't overload them with pushy sales
tactics. They purchase,
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everyone's happy, they feel
recognized. And that after the fact, you bombard them with with
information, and you don't let
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them disengage from you. You
know, we all know these stories of these subscriptions you can't
get out of without 50 clicks.
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Okay, so you respected dignity
before. And then afterwards, you want to retain them so badly
that you take away agency, you
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know, and you— and you don't
listen to them anymore, as far as what their preferences are.
And if you do that, you kind of—
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you're not telling the whole
story. And consumers will anchor on that part where you blew it.
So it has— ideally, you think about
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it all the way through the
process. And this is also coming at a
time where it seems like the
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component of performance in a
company is even more heightened, more focused on by firms so that
it feels like there's a little
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bit of a balancing act, kind of
off of what you said there, that you don't want to overdo it with
the consumer. You want to hit
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that— that right level of
connection and dignity so that you can have a great
relationship back and forth.
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Yeah, and I think it's— it's not—
not as hard as people might think it is. What we find is
even little small amounts of
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choice are— they mean something
to consumers. They notice even a change in the language that you
use. It doesn't necessarily have
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to cost a lot more. So one of
the companies that I worked with on this topic a few years ago,
who shall remain nameless, was
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very concerned that this was
just expensive. This was, you know, "Okay, we've got to retrain
all of our employees to be
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nicer." And that's not really the
case. It's really about setting up structures that allow choice
and give people voice or allow
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them privacy along the way. When
that structure exists, the consumer can navigate it. But
they're pretty sensitive, again,
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to small changes. You don't need
to rebuild your entire business necessarily. You just need to be
thoughtful about each piece of it.
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I was gonna ask you whether or
not there's a permanence to this concept that they have, or
whether or not there's a
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fluidity to it. And it almost
seems like maybe there's a little bit of both that
companies have to have in this
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mix. Yeah, it's funny. If you look at a lot
of company websites, they'll—
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you konw, especially in healthcare,
pharmaceuticals, to a lesser extent some other industries,
you're gonna see the word
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"dignity". It's gonna come up.
They built it into their stated purpose. I think that— and so
they— they've taken it on as
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something that they permanently
want to pursue. But then this— the next step, which is
systematically building it into
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everything the patient, the
physician, the caregiver experiences, that— that is the
connection that's only partially
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made. Another thing that's fluid
about it is that it may have to change across cultures. So we've
done some work where we've
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looked at, for example, what
dignity means for people who are in Nigeria, as opposed to people
who are in India, as opposed
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to people who are in
the United States. And in India and
the US, it's fairly similar. It
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has a lot to do with being seen
and heard. And having agency. You see those things come up over
and over again. Our Nigerian
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respondents, though, talked a
lot more about being treated fairly as part of a group,
because their group identity was
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extremely important. We also
found that Indian— or, I'm sorry, consumers in the US were, of the
three groups, least sensitive to
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the affirmation of dignity. And
if you affirm their dignity, in some cases, they actually think—
they actually feel like, "Okay,
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if you— if you respect me, I'm
going to ask for even more from you." Which, you know, could be
an opportunity for firms to grow
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too. But our consumers from
other regions sometimes said, "If you respect me, I might give you
some grace, if I don't get
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everything I want." So there's a
substitute and a complement relationship that may be fluid
across different kinds of
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markets.
- And so there's probably also kind of
multiple reactions that you will
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get from the consumer. In
certain cases, if you don't deliver, there are going to be
some consumers that are going to
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be mad. They'll go away from the
company. You know, they'll have a big negative impact. But as
you said, some may have a little
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bit of anger or angst towards
the firm. - Yeah. There can definitely be heterogeneity.
What I'll say is, on average, I
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don't think you make anything
worse. Especially if you— if you incorporate agency. So if you,
early on in the process, say to
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consumers, "Listen, we can allow
you a lot of choice and a lot of control. Or we can— we can, you
know, help you out more along
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the way? Which would you prefer?"
"Oh, look." Now, you know, somebody can say, "Listen, I
don't want to think about
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everything, I don't want all the
choice." And you just simply send them down one pathway, another.
Now we may get to a point where
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AI will actually be able to tell
who are the people who value agency at every step, and who
are the people that are happier
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to have a more supported
experience. But right now, it's also not a hard thing to do to ask.
And people tend to be able to
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self report this kind of thing. So you talk about the next step
in the process and potentially
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being around AI. And obviously,
we're learning so much about how AI is going to be impacting what
we do on a daily, weekly,
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monthly basis. I guess most
companies are already starting to think about so many things
about AI, including this
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component as well.
- Yeah, there's a big movement that has—
that is focused on data dignity. And
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these folks are pointing out
again that representation, which is one of these three
pieces of dignity, also means not
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being seen when you don't want
to be seen. Which would mean I don't want to be included in
that data set that's used to
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predict everyone's preferences.
Or certainly, we would want our data to be used in ways that we
feel good about. You know,
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otherwise, what's basically
happening is our voice is being co-opted by a firm. And people
do not like that experience. So
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I think, too, there— there'll be
regulations about that, that will be— that will slowly work their
way through the courts. But we
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do need to be sensitive to the
way that consumers are seen and heard. And the extent to which
they begin to feel that their
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control is— is being eroded by
the way that artificial intelligence is used to connect
with them. You know, when we
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connect with a person, I think
we're all very aware that at the end of the day, we get to walk
away. But if everywhere we go in
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the environment, there's some
AI reaching out to us, we lose agency. And so we probably— we're
gonna have to learn a lot about
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how to— how to use that in a way
that doesn't make humans feel as though they're devalued relative
to technology.
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Okay, thanks very much for your
time today. And thanks for joining us here on Ripple
Effect Meet the Authors.
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- Thank you so much.
- Cait Lamberton, Marketing Professor here at Wharton. The book, by the
way, again, is titled <i>Marketplace</i>
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<i>Dignity: Transforming How We
Engage With Customers Across</i> <i>Their Journey</i>. - Thank you for
listening to The Ripple Effect.
00:14:40
We hope you found this episode
informative and engaging. Don't forget to subscribe and leave us
a review so that we can continue
00:14:47
to bring you the best insight
from the Wharton School.