The Art of Withholding Information

Primary Lesson:

The most important lesson from the reading is that information isn’t just simply information. Information given before an actual experience can alter a person’s perception of the experience completely. Knowledge does not merely inform, but actually reshapes a consumer’s sensory perceptions to align with that knowledge. Plainly put, previously held impressions can affect our experience of a product or service. Using this lesson as a guide, we as marketers can design valuable experiences for consumers by allowing certain information to reach the consumer and keep other information from consumers before they experience our products.

For example, in the article the students who knew about the vinegar in the beer after tasting the beer liked the beer better than those who were told about the vinegar up front. In order to get consumers to try new things that they might be hesitant to try due to unfamiliarity with the product, we can keep certain knowledge hidden until afterwards. A French restaurant who cooks the best escargot dish in the world wants to impress its American patrons and expand their horizon in food. However, these patrons are a little put off by the idea of eating escargot. The restaurant can hold an open tasting event in which patrons try dishes without knowing the ingredients first. This lack of knowledge allows consumers to try the dish and decide for themselves the quality and taste without allowing cultural perceptions and mental blockage to stand in the way. Who knows, an American patron can become a regular at the restaurant and orders the escargot every time. In this case, the restaurant gains a loyal customer and the customer expands his “food horizon.”

Another example of how marketers can use the power of information in their quest to gain valuable insights about consumers is to test purchase intent given different information on a product’s packaging before the consumer actually uses the product. If a shoe brand company wants to know whether to include “Made in China” on its shoe’s packaging, the company can create two prototypes, one with the label and one without. The marketer can ask for consumes’ purchase intent of the two prototypes. If the consumer who sees the label before trying out the shoes decides its lower quality and therefore has lower purchase intent, the marketer will gain the insight that the label as a form of prior information does not convey quality and therefore, should not be available to consumers when consumers first see the shoes on shelf.

Main Example:

The main example that Ariely provides in his explanation is a study he conducted with colleagues regarding beer tasting. They tested a “MIT Brew,” their own generic beer, in two ways with students. First, they told participants about the presence of vinegar in the beer before they tasted the brew. Second, they did so by not telling the participants anything about the vinegar content before the tasting, but revealed the presence of the vinegar after the tasting. The students’ reactions were taken as measurements of whether or not the knowledge placed before the experience actually evoked a different response than knowledge coming after the experience. The students who found out about the vinegar after drinking the beer liked the beer much better than those who were told about the ingredient up front. The ones who knew about the vinegar after the tasting liked the beer just as much as those who never found out about the vinegar. Given the choice to make their own beer, the students who knew about the vinegar afterwards who added vinegar to their beer according to the MIT Brew recipe outnumbered those who knew beforehand and still added vinegar afterwards. This example illustrated how pre-knowledge affects an experience. Two years ago, I was completely against vegan food. I thought that all vegans were crazy to cut out dairy products and that any food with no real meat, real dairy products must taste disgusting and refused to eat any of them. One of my best friends decided to be a vegan. The problem was that I would not go out to eat with him at vegan restaurants. In order to get me to try vegan food, he ordered veggie burgers and a vegan chocolate cake from Mother’s and brought it over to me masking it as takeout from another “normal” restaurant. I ate the burger without really paying attention to it and ate what I thought was a brownie. Afterwards, he told me that the entire meal was from a vegan restaurant. Although I was shocked, it didn’t really change my liking towards the food I had just consumed. I was a lot more accepting of his choice of restaurants after that experience. Had I known the burger and chocolate cake were vegan, I would’ve never taken a bite! Good thing he withheld that information until later.