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what my colleague and I have been interested in is understanding what types of products people like to buy
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when they're pursuing different goals so for example you're trying to lose weight
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you want to get fit you have different professional goals and in particular we want to know do you want the product
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that tells you hey we'll do it all for you we'll make this very easy for you or
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do you want the product that says will help you will be a nice compliment will help you down this path but you have to
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work really hard as well and so that's our question so which do you want the
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kind of the hero or more of just the helper and we think that one important determinant of this is your feeling of
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control over outcomes in your life so the extent to which you feel as if you can make positive things happen and
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avoid negative things in your life and we find that when people feel low control over different aspects of their
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lives they actually want the brand that's more of the helper not the hero so they want the brand that says you
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have to work hard and we'll be here to help you but we're not going to do all
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of the hard work for you so they'd rather nike come in and say you put on our shoes if you work really hard will
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help you towards this goal of losing weight or getting fit they don't want nike to come in and say put on our shoes
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and it'll do all the work for you so they want to feel as if they have to put
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in the work because this gives them a sense of empowerment and makes them feel as if eventually they can actually
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control outcomes in their lives again so that's what we've studied over a course
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of several studies and have found this same effect very reliably now we focus on two different groups
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consumers and marketers and for consumers you know the one thing we'd want people to take away is the idea
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that you may not want the product with all the bells and whistles of the product that says it will make things as
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easy for you as possible you may actually be more satisfied by picking up the product that you believe you have to
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put in a little more of the effort to see the same outcome and for marketers it's a similar idea is that your
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consumers may not want you to tell them that your product is so fantastic that it will do everything for them and that
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they don't have to put in so much work you may not want to emphasize so much
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ease in using your products or getting the benefit from your product you may want to instead focus on the idea that
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consumers have to put in a little bit of the work as they use your product and then they'll get the desired outcome
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for example if you know that you are dealing with consumers that have low control instead of automatically telling
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consumers that hey our products will make this as easy for you as possible let's say cleaning for example you have
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a Swiffer instead of focusing on how easy it is to clean with Swiffer for your low control consumer you may want
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to say hey this is a very effective product but it needs you so if you put in the hard work our product is there to
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help you along the way to make sure you gain these fantastic cleaning outcomes in your home and so in both cases you're
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talking about the product being great and getting a quality outcome but in one situation you're focusing more on the
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value of the consumer there so you're saying that the consumer has a role in
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delivering this outcome that they're looking for you know so marketers we already do a
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lot of psychographic research and so to your point we can understand who our targets are in general and we can start
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by you know throwing in questions about personal control just very basic questions to see how much control our
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target consumer feels over their outcomes in life and so that will give you a general sense a place to start
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when you're focusing on your particular target consumer we also know that there
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are different demographic trends that predict feelings of control so for example the lower you are in income
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oftentimes the lower your feelings of control or the more elderly in our population often have lower feelings of
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control or others who don't have as much control over their health or just physical abilities and mobility in
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general often have lower feelings of control so some of those trends can give you cues and clues as to whether or not
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you may be dealing with consumers that have low feelings of control but it does require more targeted psychographic
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research to really understand your particular target consumer to see if this is important for them
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that's our research you know over several different experiments we focused largely on manipulating people's
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feelings of control so I'll have people write about a time when they had low
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control to make people feel this sense of local control or you know I looked at intramural basketball players and I
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would recruit people after they won and after they lost and I get a sense of control based on you know whether or not
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you want to lost your game and so in all of these cases I'm making people feel
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low or high control or using natural environments to test this but we know that there are lots of situations where
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people just chronically feel lower high control and I think our research is particularly applicable to those groups
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so for example the low-income populations or the folks who are older and age and have health issues I think
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for those groups who have these chronic issues with control issues with feeling as if they can really alter things in
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their environment I think for those groups is particularly important to think about the types of products that
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they want and how you can be more empowering in your products for them for people who always have a very high
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sense of control we find that they don't really care how you talk to them about
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their product so we didn't see much of a difference in their reactions as to
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whether another product was empowering for them or not so whether or not you said it required a lot of effort or not
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where it really mattered was for consumers when they experience low control so I mean it could be a consumer
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who typically feels high control but then they just had a very bad day and they you know turned on the news and
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read about or saw a story about a lot of violence in their neighborhood that would be enough to trigger a feeling of
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low control over their lives in that moment or maybe it's the recession that's making them feel lower control
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than they might normally feel so even those high control people if you can find moments in which they feel though
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control that's the place in which you can try to target them or you can try to
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manipulate even your communication with them to remind people that hey you may not have as much control over your life
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as you like so if you can get people to think about local control then they see this preference for the high effort
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products if you have consumers who never for some reason ever think about the fact that they may have low control then
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the results don't seem to differ much they don't seem to care yeah well you know I think there are a
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lot of interesting and tidbits and maybe buzz about high-intensity workouts nowadays so you know CrossFit programs
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or p90x and insanity all of these things where you see lots of people who love to
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work out to the point where they puke right and so it's very hard for many of
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us to understand this but I think that our research suggests in some ways that working so hard this high intensity type
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of training gives people a sense of control it's the one part of their day a
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part of their lives where even if nothing else is going right even if they have no control over anything else that
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happens when they step into the gym or when they turn on their video to work out this is the one thing they have
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control over this is the one thing that they say you know I can make my body do what I needed to do and so I think that
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in a lot of ways these are examples of people trying to reassert control through their effort
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on one hand I hope that it just allows people to see that we may all try to reassert control in different ways ways
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that we may not expect in ways that don't necessarily seem always logical or
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rational to others but it's our way our piece of kind of establishing control in
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life I think also there are sometimes stereotypes or beliefs that folks who typically have lower control so folks
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with lower income or physical disabilities we tend to think that they want us to make things very easy for
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them and that may not be the case they want to be able to exert some levels of effort so that they can empower
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themselves and achieve outcomes and so hopefully this research will help to shed a bit of light on that
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so there's been research done for a long time looking at low feelings of control
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and a lot of the research suggests that low feelings of control leads people to give up more quickly so if I give you a
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puzzle and you have low feelings of control you won't spend as much time on it or if I put you under certain amount
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of pain you'll be less likely to be able to deal with that pain or to endure and
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what our research is suggesting is that if you give people a tool or a prop like
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brands that just gives them the sense that there's someone here something here
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to help you that you can get low control people to actually want to put in the effort because now this is their chance
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they've got nike by their side right so now they have a chance to say let me put
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in his hard work I know I can do it I have support here and now i can feel empowered and so they're not as likely
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to give up as what we've seen in prior research so we've been thinking a bit about this
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idea of effort and we're wondering how feelings of control may impact things
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like cheating for example so you know both in an academic context but also in a more business-related context it could
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be cheating on taxes it could be stealing if flow control folks are more interested in effort when they feel as
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if they can engage in effort how does this impact cheating might we see differences between low and high control
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we think that'd be interesting we're also interested in learning more about
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what aspects of our environment particularly our shopping environments influence people's feelings of control
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so what is it about you know going into a target or a Walmart that might inspire
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low feelings of control or high feelings of control so we think you know understanding more systematically about
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feelings of control and the retail environment would be interesting you