The Placebo Effect in Marketing: Sometimes you Just Have to Want it to Work

Abstract

In their article, Shiv, Carmon, and Ariely (2005, hereinafter SCA) document for the first time that nonconscious expectations about the relationship between price and quality can influence consumers in a placebo-like manner. Even when the price paid for a good has absolutely no relationship to its actual quality, consumers’ nonconscious beliefs about the price‐quality relationship change their actual experience with the good. As Berns (2005) notes, performance is enhanced beyond the baseline by drawing attention to the marketing claims surrounding the product. Broadly speaking, a placebo has been defined in the medical literature as “a substance or procedure that has no inherent power to produce an effect that is sought or expected” (Stewart-Williams and Podd 2004). In more colloquial terms, a placebo is essentially a “sugar pill.” Such placebo effects have been observed in numerous medical settings, from relatively benign maladies, such as warts and the common cold, to more serious diseases, such as diabetes, angina, and cancer (Kirsch 1997). Across multiple medical domains, the placebo effect has been shown to be enduring and even capable of reversing the effects of active medications (Kirsch 1997). In marketing, a placebo of this form might be a brand that claims to have certain properties that it does not actually possess and, through such claims, changes the consumer’s behavior. In their work, SCA demonstrate that expectations play an important role in marketing placebo effects. Indeed, support for the efficacy of expectations goes back more than 1700 years: “He cures most in whom most are confident” (Galen, qtd. in Jensen and Karoly 1991). In the study we report herein, we extend SCA’s results by demonstrating the importance of motivation—a person’s desire to experience the product’s purported benefits—as a driver of marketing placebo effects. Motivation has also been shown to play a strong role in medical placebo studies such that when people want the physical symptoms, a placebo effect more likely will manifest (Jensen and Karoly 1991; Vase et al. 2003). We also extend and support SCA’s findings by documenting for the first time a sugar pill placebo effect for everyday