In 2017, RetailMeNot, a coupon site, launched a new marketing campaign. After years of focusing on television advertising, the company switched to digital video. It aimed one part of the campaign at millennial moms who search and shop with their phones, while another part of the campaign targeted slightly older moms who still use Facebook.
Both parts of the campaign used videos hosted by model and actress Brooklyn Decker. She encouraged viewers to share their shopping deals on social media and use the hashtag #DealBrag.
The idea, explained Marissa Tarleton, RetailMeNot’s chief marketing officer, was that consumers sharing the news about a great deal they’ve found inspires their family and friends to look for deals of their own. By encouraging customers to show off the bargains they’d found, RetailMeNot was hoping they would increase word of mouth marketing and boost their sales.
The company had recognized the power of personal recommendations. According to one 2018 study, 83 percent of Americans share more than 2.1 billion word-of-mouth recommendations every day. Those recommendations, the study claims, generate more than $7 trillion in annual consumer spending in the U.S. alone. Companies that can trigger word of mouth marketing should be able to turn one sale into another and one customer into multiple customers.
But the hashtag wasn’t inspired by the idea that people would want to help their friends land a similar discount. The assumption was that people who had managed to save money would want to show off their shopping skills. They’d want their friends to see how smart they are and win admiration for their ability to do something that other people would want to do but can’t.
“RetailMeNot is encouraging people to brag about saving,” said the company, “because, let’s be honest, who doesn’t love sharing a great deal?”
Or to put it another way: who doesn’t love showing off when they think they’ve done something impressive?
It might have been a cynical take for a company focused on discount codes and cashback offers but would it work? Does encouraging customers to show off their purchases produce the kinds of word-of-mouth marketing that businesses need to generate sales online?
A study published recently in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science has tried to find an answer. The study’s authors conducted a series of five tests during which they attempted to manipulate volunteers’ sense of arrogance before asking them how likely they were to show off their accomplishments.
In the first study, the researchers simply asked volunteers to indicate the brand of car they own, then complete a survey of their consumer arrogance, which the researchers defined as “a propensity to broadcast one’s superiority over others in the consumption domain.” Questions in the survey asked whether the volunteers often buy products that emphasize their social status, whether they believe that they usually know the best buy, and whether they like to show others their purchases. They then asked the volunteers to evaluate a new car model that was not yet on the market and list everything they liked about the interior and exterior. The researchers counted the number of favorable evaluations as a measure of online word of mouth communications.
That pilot study demonstrated a link between a sense of consumer arrogance and a willingness to boast about purchases. Throughout the next set of studies, the researchers then tried to manipulate that sense of arrogance in order to encourage word of mouth recommendations. They asked the volunteers to imagine themselves being interviewed by a local TV station as they describe the factors that make them superior consumers. They were also asked to imagine that a store or brand had told them that they were “one of their superior consumers… a consumer who is a better shopper than most people” and asked them to leave a review. After each manipulation, the volunteers wrote their review and indicated the likelihood that they would share the experience of their purchase with others.
The researchers found that having made volunteers feel good about their buying abilities, those volunteers were keener to show off what they had bought. “We found that if you can trigger people’s sense of consumer arrogance, they’re more likely to engage in word-of-mouth communication,” Ayalla Ruvio, a professor of marketing and the lead author of the study said in a press release.
The volunteers’ motivation, the researchers argue, is self-enhancement. A sense of arrogance makes us want to show off, to win admiration from others, and improve our own social status. The images of happy, toned people working out in gyms or enjoying fine cuisine that fill Facebook and Instagram are intended to show followers that the user is able to live a better life than most.
Finding a good product to purchase—and landing it for a bargain—Ruvio and her colleagues suggest, is a strong enough achievement to inspire word of mouth marketing if the customer has a strong enough sense of arrogance.
What to Say to Create an Arrogant Customer
So how do you trigger that sense of arrogance? How do you push customers from feeling good about purchasing from you to feeling so good about themselves that they want to tell everyone they know what they purchased from you?
The researchers note that asking customers to spread the word isn’t enough. “The results,” they say, “suggest that soliciting consumers to merely write a review is not as effective as triggering their sense of consumer arrogance.” Without that initial arrogance trigger, campaigns such as RetailMeNot’s #dealbrag won’t generate significant word-of-mouth marketing.
What can do the trick though is the wording of the request. The researchers asked groups of volunteers to imagine that they had received an email from a brand whose smartphone they had purchased. One group was given a control email that simply read:
Thank you for being a BRAND NAME customer!
As a BRAND NAME customer, what you think matters to us, and we care about providing you with a meaningful customer experience.
Please take a moment and share your experience with the BRAND NAME smartphone you own.
It’s the kind of email that brands often send automatically after a purchase to try to generate reviews. To trigger arrogance, though, the researchers asked another group to imagine that they had received this follow-up email:
Thank you for being a BRAND NAME superior customer!
As a BRAND NAME superior customer, a consumer who is a better shopper than most people, what you think matters to us, and we care about providing you with a meaningful customer experience.
Please take a moment and share your experience with the BRAND NAME smartphone you own. In other words, please tell other customers about the BRAND NAME smartphone you’ve purchased, feel free to brag about it and show it off.
The result of the second email was both a higher reported sense of superiority and a greater likelihood of bragging about the purchase.
That second email though was written by researchers rather than by copywriters who might do a better, more subtle job of triggering arrogance. Explaining why someone is “a better shopper than most people” instead of simply stating it would sound more plausible and have a stronger effect. The brand, for example, could name their purchase and point out that only a small percentage of customers had managed to take advantage of this limited offer. By proving that the customer is a better shopper than most, the brand would have a stronger chance of triggering the arrogance it needs to generate word of mouth marketing.
Dealing with Negative Experiences
Praising customers’ buying skills before asking them to tell people about their purchase may be simple enough but what happens if those customers didn’t like the purchase? Will telling them that they’re great shoppers who should tell everyone about their amazing bargains inspire them to warn their friends not to buy your products if it turns out they weren’t happy with them?
Ruvio and her colleagues conducted some research into negative reporting too, and found that the response depends on the context. After manipulating the sense of arrogance felt by one group of volunteers, the researchers asked them to rate the likelihood that they would share information about six positive or negative consumption events with others. The results suggested that customers who feel that they are excellent shoppers are more likely to report a good buy than a bad one, but they were also more likely to report a bad experience than a control group would. “Triggering the participants’ sense of consumer arrogance led to a greater need for self-affirmation, which increased their intentions to engage in negative [word of mouth],” the researchers conclude.
You can tell people that they’re great shoppers but if they’re not happy with what they purchased they won’t feel like great shoppers. They’ll then try to regain that sense of self-satisfaction by winning praise from their friends by telling them what not to buy. Negative reviews also have more impact because they clearly come from non-marketing sources. When someone says that their phone broke down or the restaurant service was poor, readers are more likely to believe them than believe someone who says that everything was great.
But negative reviews also risk showing the reviewer as a bad shopper so this increase in the likelihood of sharing a negative experience is mediated by social context. In the researchers’ final study, they manipulated volunteers’ consumer arrogance and divided them into two groups. One group imagined that they had received poor service in a restaurant while dining with friends, while the other group imagined that they had received the poor service while dining alone. Those who had imagined they had dined in a group were more likely to share that negative experience than the volunteers who had imagined dining alone.
“For products with high social visibility, ” the researchers warn, “firms should use caution when triggering consumers’ arrogance. The focus should be on triggering consumers’ arrogance about products and brands, with careful distancing from the social context of negative consumption experiences.”
How to Create Smug Customers
Ruvio and her colleagues offer a long list of managerial implications for their studies. Marketers, they say, should appeal to consumers’ arrogant tendencies to generate word of mouth marketing; they should trigger that arrogance strategically rather than as a tactical marketing measure, and without focusing on bragging alone; and they should be cautious about triggering that arrogance if the product or service was bought in a social context.
That makes the strategy particularly useful for marketers who sell online. They should follow up each sale with an email explaining why the customer made such a good purchase, why they managed to land such a high value, and detailing the savings they managed to generate. Finally, they should end that email with a call to action that encourages the customer to tell their friends how well they did so that they can land a great deal too.
The result should be a profitable #humblebrag rather than an ineffective #dealbrag.
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