The study, conducted at a Chinese university with students, found that there’s a gap between how we perceive an item based on experience and how we perceive an item based on what we know about it. For example, you might have a great digital camera that takes clear pictures, which in marketing jargon is called “hedonic preference,” which the study authors also defined as “liking.” But not only do you know your camera takes great pictures, you also know if it is 5 mega pixels, or 2 mega pixels (specifications). Both of these factors contribute to purchasing decisions – liking and specs, or numbers – and the authors tested students to see whether liking or specs contributed most to their buying decisions.

The study tested the students on five items: a digital camera, sesame oil, towels, cell phones and potato chips. I won’t go through the details of all, but I’ll go through their process for the digital camera to give you an idea of what they did, since their methodology was the same for each type of item.

The authors took a single 10-inch photo of Tiananmen Square, and used Photoshop to create one version that was sharper and one version that was more vivid. They told the students that the two photos were taken with different cameras, which the students were supposed to pretend were their two narrowed-down choices for purchase. The two models of camera were alike in all aspects, including price except for the sharpness and vividness. The authors told one group of students nothing else about the cameras, and the about 25 students liked, or would have purchased, the camera that had made the sharper image. But when the authors gave another group of students specs about the other (vivid) camera, their decisions were reversed from the first group. More than half picked the vivid photo’s camera. (The specs were the total number of dots, and another group was told the diagonal number of dots, much like how a TV is measured diagonally in inches.) The number of dots was made up for each group, but each group chose the “vivid” camera over the “sharp” camera, whereas the control group given no specs chose the “sharp” camera based on experience because there were no numbers presented.

The authors had the same types of groups for each of the other four items, and each time, the groups that were given the specs said they would purchase whichever item had the higher specs. The authors conclude with some advice to marketers and consumers: marketers, if your product doesn’t have some kind of numeric measure attached to it, try to find one and include the number in your marketing message. Consumers, don’t get too hooked on numbers and make your purchasing decisions based on experience.