Product contagion: How consumers' fear of cooties can cut into profits

Everyone needs garbage bags. Women need maxi-pads. Cat people need cat litter. And parents with babies buy diapers. But according to Andrea Morales, an assistant professor of marketing at the W. P. Carey School of Business, the fact that we need these items doesn't change the fact that we can be repulsed by them. And if retailers were smart, says Morales, they would be sure to keep these undesirable items away from other, less icky products — or else.

Everyone needs garbage bags. Women need maxi-pads. Dog owners need dog food, and cat people need cat litter. Parents with babies buy diapers. But according to one researcher at the W. P. Carey School of Business, the fact that we need these items doesn't change the fact that we can be repulsed by them. And if retailers were smart, says Andrea Morales, they would be sure to keep these undesirable items away from other, less icky products — or else.

That's because, according to Morales' latest research, any number of cringe-worthy items — cat litter or lard, diapers or stomach medicines, maxi-pads or cigarettes — can have a seriously negative effect on the way consumers view other items with which they happen to come in contact. This so-called "product contagion" effect, says Morales, can turn the stomachs of even the most rational buyers, make usually attractive products unappealing and, ultimately, cut directly into retailers profits.

"People often don't believe, or don't know, that they are affected by this contagion," says Morales, an assistant professor of marketing at W. P. Carey. "But it's real." Morales may well be the nation's foremost expert in what she calls "contagion effects" in a consumer context — that is, the study of how "contamination" by other shoppers, other products or any number of other forces can negatively influence consumer opinions.

Contamination by association

In earlier work, Morales proved consumers can be turned off to clothing items when they believe those items have been previously tried on, or simply touched, by other shoppers (a phenomenon she calls "consumer contamination"), and she's currently investigating whether "disgusting" ads — such as those for anti-fungal products — may actually backfire, making those products undesirable even for those who need them.

The recent work on "product contagion," for its part, offers some of the strongest data yet backing the idea that "disgust" truly does play a large role in shaping consumer behavior. According to the study, consumers seem to believe, either consciously or subconsciously, that a disgusting product — even a brand-new product still wrapped its original packaging — can somehow leach its profound icky-ness to the non-disgusting products it touches.

As a result, these consumers will avoid buying the "contaminated" products. "We thought we might see a very subtle effect," Morales says of the research. "But the effects were actually quite strong ... " Morales conducted the research with Gavan Fitzsimons, a professor of marketing and psychology at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business.

Both Fitzsimons and Morales were introduced to the idea of "contagion" while attending a seminar by Paul Rozin, a pioneering professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania who introduced the idea of "contagion" operating in the modern world. Morales knew the idea was one that could be applied to the world of business — retail environments, especially — but in order to do so, she and Fitzsimons first had to figure out exactly which kinds of everyday products most grossed people out.

How disgusting is that?

A series of interviews with everyday consumers helped them do just that, and before long, more than a few products stood out as the truly offensive. "There are a lot of items and products that generated levels of disgust above the midpoint — sanitary napkins, anything with 'gastrointestinal' in the name, dog food, cat litter," Morales says. "Cigarettes also received very high disgust ratings."

With their list of disgusting products in hand, then, Morales and Fitzsimons set up their experiments: The pair arranged the disgusting and non-disgusting items in shopping carts or on shelves, just as they would appear in an actual store. Then variables were introduced: In some conditions, for instance, the undesirable products and desirable products were simply placed near each other. In others, the products were actually touching.

The researchers then gauged the reaction to these products from undergraduate students who served as the studies' "consumers. We put disgusting products either next to or touching products that were considered appealing — cookies, for example — and asked, 'What do you think of those cookies?'" Morales said. The results, it turned out, weren't the least bit fuzzy. Morales and Fitzsimons say they turned up "strong evidence" supporting the existence of product contagion — stronger evidence, in fact, than Morales expected.

Among the researchers' principal findings:

• Contagion can occur even when actual contamination does not take place. In fact, only "perceived contact" is necessary, the researchers say, meaning contagion can occur even when the product packages — and not the actual products — come in contact with one another.
• "In one experiment, we looked at how consumer evaluations of cookies changed depending on whether a package of maxi pads was touching or simply near a package of chocolate chip cookies," explains Morales. "When the items were next to one another on a shelf but not touching, the cookies were rated highly. But when the package of cookies was actually in contact with the box of maxi-pads, even though there was no real chance of any contamination happening, the rating of the cookies dropped significantly. And this was true for both men and women."
• Contagion is a highly visual phenomenon. The team wrote: "The more easily imagined the physical contact between the source and target of contagion, the greater the transfer of negative properties and the decrease in evaluations," Illustrative of this point, the team found that clear packaging — which allows consumers to "see" the various products — appeared to strengthen the contagion effect.
• Subjects were "largely unwilling or unable to admit" that contagion influenced their decisions.This finding, say the researchers, is consistent with earlier research on contagion — people apparently don't like to believe they can be affected by such an irrational fear.

• Contagion lasts. The effects of product contagion, the team says, "persist across time and can influence choice, reflecting a meaningful change in evaluations." In one experiment, participants looked at the products on a shelf but were not asked to report their evaluations of the cookies for over an hour. Even after such a long delay between seeing the products and evaluating them, the ratings of the cookies were still affected by having had contact with a disgusting product.

  Morales also found this to be the case whenever she ran experiments in class. Long after students had completed the experiment and class was over, she offered cookies from the box that had been touching the package of maxi pads — still unopened, still technically uncontaminated — to her students. Even then, a lot of students did not want the cookies.

"I would offer the cookies and some people would say 'No,'" Morales said, "They would audibly say, 'I don't want that — it was touching the feminine products.'" Morales says the results generated by this study were comparably powerful to those she turned up in her related work on "consumer contamination."

In that research, she found that when consumers believed a shirt had been "contaminated" by others, their ratings of those shirts dropped significantly, even when the shirt actually had never been tried on and was brand new. And when Morales varied the experiments to hint at longer or more thorough contamination, consumer ratings of the shirt dropped accordingly.

But while those findings were revealing, they were also pretty much what Morales expected. The product contagion work, by contrast, is somewhat surprising, Morales says. "People are less willing to believe this effect is real," Morales jokes. "With [the clothing research], it seemed fairly intuitive that people wouldn't want a shirt that somebody else had tried on. That just seems yucky. But this one is harder to believe because it seems somewhat irrational."

Nonetheless, it's true — in a surprising number of ways. Take, for example, the rice cake-lard experiment. "In one case, we put a container of lard touching a package rice cakes — and this actually not only made the rice cakes seem less appealing, but also more fattening," Morales says. "It's almost as if people believe the lard will ooze its fat onto the rice cakes."

Bottom Line:

• A new study from the W. P. Carey School of Business proves that when undesirable products such as diapers, lard, maxi pads and others come in contact with other more desirable items, consumers lower their ratings of the desirable items. This is known as "product contagion."
• Although product contagion does not require the products themselves (e.g., a cookie outside of its package) to come in contact with one another, the product packages have to be touching in order to generate the effect. Merely having products near one another on a shelf or in a grocery cart is not enough for contagion to occur. The physical contact between packages is necessary.
• The effects of product contagion are not temporary. Even after products are removed from their "contaminated" settings, previously formed opinions about those products remain.
• To mitigate product contagion, retailers should be sure not to place undesirable items in contact with other items on store shelves. Unfortunately, however, it is harder to control which products end up touching one another in the shoppers' own grocery carts.