Framing is an important topic in marketing. At its simplest, research in framing and product experience investigates the impact of information packaging. The same information can have different effects depending upon presentation choices. Of course, as with any important idea, each researcher has their own precise definition.
Framing As Description
Levin and Gaeth (1988) use a deliberately simple definition of framing. To them, framing is the same as a description. They assess how consumers evaluate meat. This is described as 75% lean or 25% fat. These are the same thing, of course. Still, the exact description used produces different consumer behavior.
Perhaps one shouldn’t be surprised to learn that reminders of fat content, i.e., 25% fat, leads to lower evalations. Consumers saw 25% fat as being more associated with fat than 75% lean. They also tended to see the meat as of lesser quality and greasier. (There was no effect on taste).
Framing And Product Experience
The authors wanted to examine the effect of product experience. A such, they saw:
- a) what happened to ratings without a taste of the meat,
- b) with a taste before, and
- c) with a taste after.
As someone who doesn’t eat meat, I have to ask how did this get through ethics review? Such reviews nowadays worry about all sorts of nonsense. Here cows were killed for science and no one seemed to care. I guess it was the eighties.
Did Sampling Matter?
Did sampling the product matter. Yes.
..results can be stated in two different ways. On the one hand, the alternate labeling of a product attribute in positive or negative terms did affect the consumers’ evaluations even when they actually consumed the product. On the other hand, the labeling or framing effect was reduced when consumers sampled the product as compared to when they did not.
Levin and Gaeth, 1988, page 377
The result is reasonable. Actual experience means that labels lose some of their power. Still, the power of labels doesn’t totally go away.
On a different note reading, this paper always makes me jealous. The authors took a massive shortcut to make their life easier. They use prior research findings and so violated random assignment. This idea underpins the value of this sort of research. They wouldn’t do that nowadays I’m sure. Nearly thirty years on [written in 2015] if we could still take such shortcuts getting published would be so much easier.
For more on messaging see here, here, and here.
Read: Irwin P. Levin and Gary J. Gaeth (1988), How Consumers Are Affected By The Framing Of Attribute Information Before And After Consuming The Product. Journal of Consumer Research, December, Volume 15, pages 374-378.