Individual Differences in Marketing Placebo Effects: Evidence from Brain Imaging and Behavioral Experiments

A wealth of research has explored whether marketing-based expectancies such as price and brand quality beliefs influence the consumption experience and subsequent behavior, but almost no research has examined individual differences in "marketing placebo effects." In this article, the authors suggest three moderators of the effect of marketing-based expectancies on the behavioral and neural measures of the consumption experience, based on previous findings from neuroscientific literature investigating traditional clinical pain placebo effects. They use a novel automated structural brain imaging approach to determine individual differences and combine this approach with traditional behavioral experiments. The findings show that consumers high in reward seeking, low in somatosensory awareness, and high in need for cognition are more responsive to marketing placebo effects.