When we fall in love with a product but fail to catch its name, the obvious solution is to search for it online—guided only by our fuzzy recollection of the product and a few general search terms. How likely are we to correctly identify the target product among the many similar items advertised online? In an illuminating study, HKUST’s Sang Kyu Park and colleague reveal that the search process itself may affect our chance of success. Ironically, the more we search for a product online, the less likely we are to pick it out from a “product line-up.” The study’s findings offer important practical guidance for consumers, retailers, and marketers.
Enamored of a friend’s armchair in which you have had the pleasure of sitting, you realize that you need exactly the same chair in your life. Armed with just a hazy memory of what the chair looked like, you embark on an online search. “Whether we see a product in an advertisement but fail to register the name of the brand, observe others using an attractive product but are reluctant or unable to ask for details,” say the researchers, “we often later find ourselves looking for the specific product we encountered before.”
The challenge is to correctly identify the target brand, model, or product from the huge range of lookalikes available online. “Consumers try to assess the visual match between the options they encounter in the search and a representation they hold in memory of a specific item,” the authors explain. However, an important question remains unanswered. “How likely is a consumer to correctly identify the target product when they finally encounter it?” ask the researchers.
They hypothesized that screening more items increases the “internal matching threshold,” the point at which the consumer is certain that a given product is the one they have been searching for. That is, with each rejection of a similar looking but incorrect product comes the mounting sense that the true target should feel more familiar than all of the options screened so far. “Consequently,” propose the researchers, “screening more options makes consumers more conservative judges, but—ironically—it may also make them less likely to correctly identify the true target.”
To test this novel hypothesis, the researchers conducted five studies with 1,294 participants to investigate how the search process affected consumers’ target identification and the role of the internal matching threshold in this process. As predicted, the more lookalike products consumers screened, the more conservative they became. The elevated internal threshold made consumers less likely to recognize the product they have been searching for when it finally appeared in the lineup. “The longer people try to form a particular judgment, the less likely they are to generate an accurate response,” explain the researchers.
This finding has important practical implications for consumers, sellers, and marketers. When hunting for half-remembered products online, consumers should limit their search time. “Sellers may benefit from including a rich array of keywords pertaining to the product’s visual cues,” add the researchers. To further increase the likelihood of a visual match, marketers should draw consumers’ attention to vivid online cues.
This study reveals for the first time how the dynamics of online search process affects consumers’ downstream identification accuracy. The results may also inform broader applications of visual identification strategies.