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September 12, 2020 31 mins

I have the box my iPhone came in. So do many of you, I would guess. Many people keep their iPhone boxes. We keep them for various reasons, and most of them boil down to because we like how they look. It turns out, customers care a lot about how things look, and it influences their buying (and box-keeping) behavior.

 

This episode of The Intuitive Customer explores the research of Claudia Townsend, associate professor of marketing at the University of Miami at the Miami Herbert Business School. She discovered that how things look and how you display items affects how people think about them and, often, whether they will buy them.

Key Takeaways

There are a few things to remember about esthetics, per Professor Townsend.

  1. A deliberate focus on esthetics was once reserved for luxury items but not anymore. In the beginning,  luxury brands were the most interested in creating outstanding esthetic design. It was for products that had met every other function and needed a differentiation from the competition. Today, however, the focus on elevated esthetics is universal.
  2. Esthetic preferences affect even hyper-rational buying decisions. We are aware that looks drive purchases like cars and clothes, but they also influence which companies stock we buy. In one of Professor Townsend's early papers, she analyzed stockholders' buying behavior after receiving an annual report. The research team learned that how many colors and images the firm used in the annual report affected investor behavior—and this behavior was the same even among experienced investors. 
    1. The appreciation of esthetics is universal. We all have preferences, even if we don't know fashion or trends. 
    2. Our appreciation is innate an unconscious. We don't do it consciously. We like what we like.
    3. The space between items in a display also affects our buying decisions. In another paper, Professor Townsend did with Julio Sevilla, their research suggested that the amount of space in a display affects the value we assign to objects. When items have a lot of space between them, we think they are more expensive than when they are close together. Professor Townsend says this innate judgment is hard to change. 
  3. There are two things organizations should learn from this: 
  1.  

Recommended Actions

There are a few ways you can use this concept to manage your Customer Experience:


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