糖心TV

Pierre Chandon (INSEAD)

How Package Design Makes us Fat: Volume Estimation Heuristics and Portion Size Preferences

Given the current concerns about overconsumption, understanding consumer response to product supersizing and downsizing is an important issue for policy makers, consumer researchers, and marketers. In this presentation, I will first examine how people intuitively estimate volume changes. Across a series of experiments and field studies, I will show that people strongly underestimate size changes, particularly when packages and portions change in three vs. two vs. just one spatial dimensions (height, width, and length). I will also show that these errors occur not because people miss that some dimensions are changing, but because they add instead of multiplying the changes in height, width, length.

Drawing on these results, I show that marketers can manage perceptions of product supersizing and downsizing, can influence how much people use, how much they are willing to pay, and what size they prefer.