Tag: consumer behavior



If Americans fulfilled their java urges the same way they carefully shopped for groceries, they would visit five to seven various chain coffee shops regularly—for a blend of different categories.

In fact, it turns out that grocery categories such as dessert toppings, motor oil, candles and refrigerated ethnic foods were some of the leading products that lure customers to separate stores.

In the first test of detailed consumer-buying habits by categories at more than one chain store selling groceries, a team of business school researchers led by Washington University in St. Louis found that shoppers weren’t monogamist or bigamist but rather polygamist in their choice of outlets.

The vast majority—a whopping 83 percent—regularly visited between four and nine chain stores within a year’s time to purchase groceries. Of 1,321 households studied among this rich dataset, only 12 stayed loyal to just one store. More than half, at 51.1 percent, went to the average of five to seven different stores. Eighty-eight households, or six of every 100, went to 10 or more.

So much for store loyalty.

Shattering conventional wisdom on grocery loyalty

Using tracked data from a vendor utilizing a swipe card akin to a loyalty card, the researchers parsed more than $1 million worth of shopping transactions over 53 weeks involving 248 types of products sold at 14 retail chain stores in a large metropolitan market. The study, “Polygamous Store Loyalties: An Empirical Investigation,” was published last month in the Journal of Retailing.

“Store loyalty was pretty much a given in grocery retail,” said senior author Seethu Seetharaman, director of the Center of Customer Analytics and Big Data and the W. Patrick McGinnis Professor of Marketing at Olin Business School. “When people do their shopping, it’s the store close to where they live—location, location, location, like the real-estate mantra.

“Then there is a group of choosy consumers who stop at many stores, shopping for bargains or certain brands or products,” he said. “They’ve been called ‘cherry pickers.’” Often, those folks were associated with coupon shoppers.

“That made us do a deeper dive, and we found that people aren’t as store loyal as we thought,” Seetharaman said. “Clearly, people are polygamous. The majority of people are shopping at six grocery stores.”

Consumers tend to shop multiple stores for multiple reasons. In fact, the data showed little loyalty to a single store or handful of stores, but more so to types of products found in a store. Consumers shopped various stories for specific product categories: frozen treats at one grocer, meat and poultry at another, and so on. The researchers called this “intrinsic store-category attractiveness.”

Seetharaman was joined in this study by one of his former graduate students, Qin Zhang, assistant professor of business at Pacific Lutheran University, and one of Zhang’s former graduate students, Manish Gangwar, assistant professor of marketing at the Indian School of Business. They specified and estimated a statistical model of how consumers fractured their shopping basket and shared their wallet across stores.

Shoppers aren't as loyal to their grocery stores as conventional wisdom would have you believe, according to new research by Olin's Seethu Seetharaman.

Shoppers aren’t as loyal to their grocery stores as conventional wisdom would have you believe, according to new research by Olin’s Seethu Seetharaman.

‘Favorite’ stores account for 40 percent of the basket

The dataset comprised chains that were either traditional supermarkets (Albertsons, Bashas’, Food 4 Less, Food City, Fry’s Food Store, IGA, Safeway, Trader Joe’s and Wild Oats Market), supercenters (Kmart and Walmart) and warehouse clubs (Costco, Sam’s Club and Smart & Final). Further evidence of an ever-changing economy in which to purchase grocery, household and health and beauty products: Some of the studied chains have dwindled since the study and no longer service several of their previous states.

“It’s very diffuse,” Seetharaman said of consumers’ purchases from a larger-than-expected list of stores. “Only 40 percent of their basket is coming from their ‘favorite’ store.”

Some other findings from the research:

  • In the market surveyed in particular, Fry’s Food Stores emerged as the market favorite by a sizable margin, with Albertson’s, Safeway and Walmart next behind it.
  • In a large set of categories, a handful of stores competed intensely: Albertson’s, Bashas’, Safeway and Fry’s.
  • Warehouse clubs attract loyalty in categories different from the traditional supermarkets and supercenters.
  • Family size predicted store loyalty—the larger families tended toward Fry’s or a Walmart Supercenter.
  • Income was a somewhat surprising predictor, in that households with higher incomes were more likely to “budget shop” at a Costco, which could be explained by the fact that large houses with large basements are usually needed to store products bought in bulk.

Companies in the grocery, household item and healthy/beauty realm could learn from such a category-intensive study, Seetharaman said. “This gives you a good sense of what you are winning, and how you are winning. But there’s no silver bullet.”

“Will it be a surprise?” Seetharaman asked. “Yes, it will be a surprise,” he said. “The traditional wisdom is: Walmart is an aggressive, everyday-low-price price retailer and Target is the assortment retailer. So let’s say both mass merchandisers … each of them has a certain strategic positioning and therefore thought they attract a certain type of consumer.

“We are upending that wisdom a little bit here: No matter what kind of strategic positioning you have carved out, consumers have a mind of their own. They are choosing to do different things in different categories. And businesses should wise up to this. Even your core customer is buying categories at other shops.”


Hannah Perfecto discovered her passion for psychology and consumer behavior when she was an undergrad at Yale University. “It was the time when a lot of these pop psychology books, like Freakonomics or Nudge, that were using data to answer questions about how people are behaving on a large scale, were coming out,” says Perfecto.

Fortunately, faculty at Yale’s School of Management were conducting research on the intersection of consumer psychology and marketing—a topic she found fascinating.

“I worked in that lab for basically my whole time there,” says Perfecto. “When I realized that I could keep doing that as a graduate student and then subsequently as a professor, I jumped at the opportunity.”

Her graduate studies would take her to West Coast, where she earned her MS and PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, and to Olin, where she continues to research judgment and decision making. Specifically, Perfecto says she looks at how marketers can make small changes to how a decision is phrased or how outcomes are described.

“Even with these small changes, we can see sometimes dramatic changes in how people make those decisions or feel about those outcomes,” she says.

Get to know Hannah Perfecto, assistant professor of marketing, in the video above.

 

Research Interests:

Consumer behavior, behavioral decision theory, meta-cognition, field experiments, research replicability and reliability

Selected Publications:

  • “Rejecting a Bad Option Feels like Choosing a Good One”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Issue 5, 659-670, with J. Galak, J.P. Simmons, and L.D. Nelson, 2017

View More Publications

Awards/Honors:

  • Hillel Einhorn New Investigator Award, Society for Judgment and Decision Making, 2016
  • AMA-Sheth Foundation Doctoral Consortium Fellow, American Marketing Association, 2016
  • Diversity Travel Scholarship, Society of Consumer Psychology, 2016

Sydney Scott, assistant professor of marketing, has spent the last decade in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania. She earned her undergraduate degree in psychology there, followed by what she calls “a natural evolution” to a master’s and PhD in marketing at Wharton.

Scott’s dual interests in psychology and marketing have been a perfect match for studying consumer behavior. She has conducted research into consumer preferences for natural, organic products versus genetically modified products.

Scott grew up in California, but is getting acquainted with her new hometown, exploring St. Louis’ ice cream shops and trying out local delicacies like gooey butter cake.

Area of Expertise:

Consumer behavior and decision-making

Research Interests:

Morality and consumption; judgment and decision-making; preference for naturalness

Selected Publications:

  • “Evidence for Absolute Moral Opposition to Gentically Modified Food in the United States”, Perspectives on Psychological Science, Issue 3, 315-324, with Y. Inbar, P. Rozin, 2016
  • “The Price of Not Putting a Price on Love”, Judgment and Decision Making, Issue 1, 40-47, with A. McGraw, D. Davis, P. Tetlock, 2016
  • “Why Does the Cognitive Reflection Test (Sometimes) Predict Utilitarian Moral Judgment (and Other Things)?”, Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, Issue 3, 265-284, with J. Baron, K. Fincher, S. Metz, 2015
  • “Asymmetrical Social Mach Bands: Exaggeration of Social Identities on the More Esteemed Side of Group Borders”, Psychological Science, Issue 10, 1955-1959, with P. Rozin, H. Zickgraf, F. Ahn, H. Jiang, 2014
  • “Integrative Complexity Coding Raises Integratively Complex Issues”, Political Psychology, Issue 5, 625-634, with P. Tetlock, S. Metz, P. Suedfeld, 2014
  • “Psychological Strategies for Winning Geopolitical Forecasting Tournaments”, Psychological Science, Issue 5, 1106-1115, with B. Mellers, L. Ungar, J. Baron, J. Ramos, B. Gurcay, K. Fincher, D. Moore, P. Atanasov, S. Swift, T. Murray, E. Stone, P. Tetlock, 2014
  • “Nudge to Nobesity I: Minor Changes in Accessibility Decrease Food Intake”, Judgment and Decision Making, Issue 4, 323-332, with P. Rozin, M. Dingley, J. Urbanek, H. Jiang, M. Kaltenbach, 2011



Important research from Olin professors can help you avoid the embarrassment of giving unwanted or unappreciated gifts this holiday season! Read on, dear consumer, before you pay good money for a present that will be shoved into a drawer, tossed in the trash, or worst of all, re-gifted!

Research from Joe Goodman, associate professor of marketing, finds that “experiential” gifts provide more happiness than “material” gifts, but that consumers are reluctant to give “experiential” gifts to people they don’t know well. Goodman and his coauthor, Sarah Lim, a researcher at the Center for Happiness Studies at Seoul National University, explain this paradox in their working paper, “Giving Happiness: Consumers Should Give More Experiences but Choose Material Gifts Instead.”  Link to paper.

Skip the Monogram

Associate marketing professor Robyn LeBoeuf says gift-givers often want to impress someone with a very personalized gift that shows how much they care and know the person. Meanwhile, the gift recipient really would prefer that you skip the monogram or gift card to that very special one-of-a-kind restaurant or store.

LeBouef  says she was surprised to find that personalized, special gifts tailored to the recipient often backfire, but it turns out that people prefer presents that are more versatile and less specific. Watch video:

LeBoeuf ‘s working paper “Excessive Personalization in Gift Giving: Givers Choose Personalized but Less-Versatile and Less-Preferred Gifts” is co-authored with
Mary Steffel, University of Cincinnati Carl H. Lindner College of Business and Elanor F. Williams, an assistant research scientist at the Rady School of Management at the University of California, San Diego.




Can you tell the difference between real Cyber Week deals and marketing gimmicks? Olin professor Selin Malkoc offers some timely tips for shoppers surfing the web for the cheapest prices.

Malkoc thumb copy

Selin Malkoc, associate professor marketing

Now that Black Friday and Cyber Monday have morphed into Cyber Week, Prof. Malkoc tells website WalletHub, “the consumers who get the best deals are the ones who are diligent in their search.” In other words, do your homework!

Read more advice from Prof. Malkoc on:

  • How to protect yourself from overspending on Cyber Monday
  • Why it’s important to compare features instead of exact model numbers
  • Wait, before you click the “buy” button

Link to WalletHub article

Link to WUSTL Newsroom story