The Modest Marketer: Do Consumers Ever Assume that Products Last Longer Than Marketers Claim?

Research on skepticism and persuasion knowledge has shown that consumers believe marketers are prone to exaggeration or stretching the truth (Boush, Friestad, and Rose 1994, Darke and Ritchie 2007, Xu and Wyer 2010). In the context of product longevity claims, this suggests that consumers may expect marketers to exaggerate the typical lifespan of their products. However, despite the general tendency of consumers to expect exaggerated marketing claims, recent work has shown that consumers may actually be discriminating in their assessment of marketer tactics (Blanchard, Carlson, and Hyodo 2016, Isaac and Grayson 2017). Rather than simply disbelieving marketing claims or assuming that claims are overstated, these articles suggest that consumers may instead take a more nuanced view of marketers' activities, e.g., by making explicit inferences about marketers' motives (Isaac, Brough and Grayson 2016), expertise (Karmarkar and Tormala 2010), or the nature of their interaction (Blanchard et al. 2016). Building on this premise of a more discriminating and nuanced schemer schema (Wright 1986), we find that consumers are sensitive to whether a marketing claim contains a repurchase cue as opposed to a default new purchase cue. In the presence of repurchase cues, many consumers assume that product longevity claims provided by marketers are conservative rather than exaggerated. We further show that repurchase cues lead consumers to assume that marketers have strategically selected a modest benchmark because of their self-interested ulterior motive to hasten product replacement. Experiment 1 was a 3-cell (cue: none, repurchase, purchase) between-participants experiment conducted online with 346 university students. Participants in the no cue condition received no information about their past experience with Prospeed badminton rackets. Those in the purchase cue condition learned that they had previously tested but never purchased a Prospeed racket. Participants in the repurchase cue condition instead learned that they already owned a Prospeed racket. Across conditions, participants were given an identical product longevity claim from Prospeed (i.e., "Most rackets take about 3 years to wear out") and asked to estimate the true lifespan of an average Prospeed racket. A one-way ANOVA on this lifespan measure yielded a significant result (F(2, 343) = 10.61, p < .001, η2 = .058). Participants in the repurchase cue condition provided estimates (M = 3.40 years, SD = 1.48) that