Carrots Make you Buy Grapes instead of Cookies

How do you get customers to choose healthy products in the supermarket? There is a trick to it and it appears to work for several products. For the first time, scientists from Maastricht University have demonstrated how you can make one product more attractive by placing something less attractive next to it.

You can influence how people behave in a shop. It is a well-known phenomenon in consumer psychology called the ‘decoy effect’. It means that consumers change their preference between two options when an attractive third option (the ‘decoy’) is presented. The effect shows that if you add a decoy, i.e. a product that hardly anyone would choose, you push people towards the product you want them to choose”, explains Gitta van den Enden.

For her research, she conducted an online experiment with 237 participants, where one group was presented with two options (chocolate and grapes) and the other group with three options (chocolate, grapes and carrots). The first group chose the healthy product as often as the unhealthy one, but the second group was presented with a third option that had been made less attractive than the grapes on the basis of product characteristics such as taste assessment and quality of ingredients. The addition of the decoy ultimately ensured that 73% of the second group chose the grapes. “So it works to push people in the direction of healthy products”, concludes Van den Enden.

Earlier research showed that the distraction effect works if the decoy and the product to be sold are easily comparable. The new trick is to add extra products. “So now we show that it also works with three different products”, says Van den Enden. The results of the study were published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE.