https://youtu.be/eIFWlD-gSzA
Introduction
With the rise of online shopping has come the rise of compulsive and often unnecessary spending, as shoppers are often lured into a multitude of sales and deals. Online payments have made it more convenient to view a greater variety of items, with a reduced sense of guilt in the absence of physical cash transactions (Michael’s House, 2018). Elizabeth Cline, the author of Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, commented on this phenomenon, saying “There’s no reason not to shop—because clothing is so cheap, you feel like, ‘Why not?’ There’s nothing lost in terms of the hit on your bank account” (Semuels, 2018).
Online shopping also provides shoppers with a double hit of euphora - once when the purchase is made, and again when the product arrives (Semuels, 2018). These sensations of euphoria can create dependencies, and this vice being so readily available can in turn lead to a rise in the prevalence of online shopping addictions. With more and more shoppers falling into the trap of online shopping, there is a need to become more aware of how our proclivities and inclinations are being exploited and manipulated by vendors, and how we can prevent developing compulsive shopping habits which lead us to purchase items we do not need.
Retalier's Tactics
Dr Gareth Harvey has highlighted the use of pressure-inducing strategies to increase shoppers’ anxieties so that they may make purchases with less deliberation (Wearn, 2018). This includes techniques such as clock countdowns, and notifications about limited stock or other viewers of your item. By making shoppers feel as if they are in competition with others, or on the brink of missing out on a sale, they are more likely to check their items out faster, which increases the likelihood of making unnecessary purchases (Mai, 2016). Prices on items are also adjusted according to consumer and market behaviour to drive sales, which means that during events such as Black Friday, you are not necessarily securing as great of a discount as advertised (Useem, 2017). The flexibility of the vendor’s ability to alter the price of their product begs to question whether the so-called original price has been tampered with to make the deal appear more lucrative, which is often the case.
Conditional offers are also employed by vendors to encourage you to buy more items than you may have originally intended. Offers such as getting a percentage off of your total bill, being offered free shipping after you exceed a certain amount, or buying more items to get another item free are some examples (Mai, 2016). This can encourage shoppers close to the threshold to spend even more money to claim the perceived deal, resulting in the acquisition of unnecessary goods. Shopper Claire Nicholas commented, "I'm a sucker for a deal - especially on kids clothes - and I'll add stuff to my basket to get the free shipping". Psychological tricks such as these are usually employed to clear stock, not to provide shoppers with a genuine bargain, and thus should be made aware of (Mehrotra, 2018).
Why the problem is important
The severity of the problem can be broken down into two aspects: current magnitude and future implications.
Current Magnitude
According to the National Retail Federation, the 2017 Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales attracted consumer spending of a whopping $682 billion, with £4.5 billion spent in the United Kingdom alone (Big Island Now, 2018). This puts the average amount spent per shopper in the United Kingdom at around £304, with 21% of shoppers later regretting the items they had purchased, a misstep amounting to an estimated average of £83 per person (Rotstein, 2018). This sudden spike in reckless spending has placed many already financially distressed individuals into further trouble, setting half of them back in repayments by three months or more (Business Report, 2017).
Future Implications
The more worrying issue is the upward trend that is being observed in reckless spending, which has been noted to be cross-generational. According to recent statistics, 18-35-year-olds are most likely to regret a purchase, with 30% wasting an average of £68 on these purchases. However, whilst a fewer percentage of Gen X’s regret a purchase, their reckless spending averages a mighty £112 of the age-high £264 overall spending average (Rotstein, 2018). As reckless spending can therefore be interpreted as an indiscriminately prevalent rather than being age-specific, more efforts have to be made to curb this pandemic before it becomes even more widespread.
Source: finder.com/uk
Our Intervention
To demonstrate the issue of unnecessary spending, we made a video that can be categorised into 2 main parts.
Firstly, we provided the viewer with context, showing the background of the issue. Starting with animation, we demonstrated the internal dialogue one may have when viewing sales and making online purchases. The viewer is then presented with a video, showing a young adult receiving a large quantity of delivered items, before realising she may have purchased items that she did not actually need, which is met with regret. Afterwards, the scene cuts back to animation, presenting the problem with statistics and facts on consumer spending and behaviour to do with unnecessary spending. We then provide three tips on how to prevent and overcome this issue.
The video was then uploaded to various social media outlets such as YouTube, Facebook, WeChat. We then measured the extent of behavioural change through the comments left on the video, as well as interviews with the viewers.
The target audience and how our project is tailored for them
Target audience
Our target audience is online sale shoppers aged between the ages of 18-35, as it is this age group which had the biggest proportion (30%) of people regretting purchases they had made. This age group is also old enough to have the largest scope of influence, being both young and malleable in their behaviour, and would be therefore less resistant to change. This was in line with our social groups of influence, being individuals within that age range. Our social influence also largely consisted of students attending the University of Warwick.
Tailored
With the busy lifestyles and short attention spans of this age group, we decided to create a short and succinct video to put forth our message before losing the interest of our viewers. With the media input of this age group coming from electronic devices, which are commonplace in the lives of young adults, this medium was seen as a better alternative compared to physical forms of media. The video also contains scenarios and lexis that are relatable to those in this age group.
Psychological and persuasion techniques used in your project
With many of the persuasion techniques overlapping one another, we decided to use the Yale Approach as our fundamental framework of analysis, whilst adding various other techniques such as the Elaboration Likelihood Model, Availability Heuristics, Implementations Intentions, to name a few.
Yale Approach
The Yale Approach can be summarised as "who said what to whom": the source, the message and the audience (Hovland, Janis & Kelley, 1953). According to this approach, many factors can be attributed to the persuasion process, for example, the credibility and attractiveness of the source, the quality and vividness of the message, and the intelligence and age of the audience (Aronson, Wilson, & Sommers, 2019). It also incorporates many other persuasion techniques that will be explained below.
“Who”
The persuasiveness by the source of the message can be increased in many aspects. Firstly, we addressed the credibility of the source. Credibility can be represented in both expertness, which is how much knowledge the source has in the field or the trustworthiness which indicates the intention of the source (Riley, Hovland, Janis & Kelley, 1954). Studies from Hovland and Weiss (1951) suggested that participants are more easily to be influenced by a prestigious journal than by an ordinary magazine. Priester and Petty (1995) also found that people are more easily persuaded by a trustworthy source than by someone who could be seen to be acting in their own personal interest. By quoting statistics from established organisations such as the National Retail Federation, we increase the credibility of our source instead of using a source lacking in substantiation (Big Island Now, 2018). These statistics are also that of the United Kingdom, making them more relatable to our largely Britain-based viewers. As the video was made by Psychology students without external funding, this eliminates the possibility of subjective bias in our research and message, thus enhancing the trustworthiness of our project as it would be seen to act more objectively in the interests of the community. Representing an esteemed university such as the University of Warwick also improves the perceived credibility of our work. In addition to this, we made use of quotes from Professor Thomas Hills, a behavioural professor at the University of Warwick who specialises in decision making, increasing the credibility of our video through the inclusion of a figure of authority (Milgram, 1963).
Quoting a familiar authoritative figure such as Professor Thomas Hills also creates a sense of relatability, increasing compliance with a phenomenon known as The Similarity Effect (Baskett, 1973). This effect suggests that we are more likely to be persuaded by an individual we deem to be more similar or recognisable to us. As students from the University of Warwick, our viewers would mainly consist of other students from the same institution. This would enhance the impact of our authority figure compared to another professor from a different university. Our video also included a short clip of one of our female groupmates imitating a shopping spree. By doing so, we mimic a situation that the viewer is likely to have experienced before, with most shoppers being female. In addition, the actor in a clip was an attractive yet down-to-earth female, increasing persuasion with the attractiveness of the source (Aronson, Wilson, & Sommers, 2019).
With most viewers already aware of possible previous purchases that they have regretted, the tips presenting in our video evoke a practical image of an improved self that one could and would want to, strive to become. This is in line with the Yale approach whereby the viewer would be more easily persuaded (Hovland, Janis, & Kelley, 1953).
“What”
The content of our video aspires to target individuals using both processing systems, depending on their ability and motivation to process the information. The Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) by Petty and Cacioppo (1986) suggests how a consumer’s personality and external factors could affect one’s information processing which ultimately influences the behaviour in e-commerce (Pickard et al., 2012). Petty and Cacioppo (1986) believed that when people are triggered to think under the peripheral route, they rely on heuristics or external cues to make the decisions. The cues can be affected by its attractiveness and credibility of the source of the message, both of which has been covered in this video (Miller, 2002). Our video is also short and succinct, coupled with flashy images, making it easier to process for those without the ability or motivation to pay attention.
Viewers using the central route of persuasion have the ability and motivation to pay attention to a given stimulus (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). Our video uses a problem-solution pattern, a proven effective structure for a reasoned argument. By having the video in a sequential pattern, one can follow the steps, similar to that of a recipe. The use of not only statistics but also of specific negative statistics such as “wasting an average of £68 on items you end up regretting” not only makes it personally relevant but also plays on viewer’s loss aversion (Tversky & Kahneman, 1991; Wegener et al., 2009). We also introduce the common ‘dilemma’ that consumers will often face, being ‘my old stuff still works, but the new one I have always wanted is a lot cheaper now’, to echo those who have experienced this in the past or are currently facing this situation now, increasing its personal relevance.
In our video, we highlighted specific pitfalls and tips to combat the issue of unnecessary spending. Some examples bring up the use of conditional offers of buying more to receive a discount off of the total price or highlighting scarcity or the competition of other buyers, causing one to make decisions quickly without making sense of the full picture (Caildini, 2001). We also played on “in-group bias” using words such as “traps” by retailers to instil a sense of viewers being the out-group, causing them as consumers do not want to benefit the retailers as willingly as before (Tajfel et al., 1979). Our last tip uses the Implementation Intention by asking viewers to make a specific shopping list and to the only search for those items. This entails noting down when they are going to shop, how they are going to shop, and what to look for when they shop, which in turn decreases the likelihood of overspending (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006). All these specific examples and points mirror the pique technique, citing that the more specific a request is, the higher the degree of compliance (Santos, Leve, & Pratkanis, 1994). This allows for increased ease of retrieval in their availability heuristic, causing viewers to easily recall these points when they are faced with similar situations (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973). The tips were confined to a few points at the end of the video to play on the recency effect (Baddeley, 1976).
In addition, the video is constructed in a powerful linguistic style, as Holtgraves and Lasky (1999) found that a message is less persuasive when given in a powerless linguistic style, which tends to include more hedges, tag questions and hesitations. Previous studies suggested that powerless speech could result in the speaker or the argument being perceived as less attractive and less credible (Erickson, Lind, Johnson, & Obarr, 1978). Furthermore, viewers can pick up on non-verbal behaviours such as smiling, a tone of voice and eye contact to help them perceive the right message (Kiesler et al., 1984). Studies found that when information is low in vividness, it is less likely to attract attention from consumers, while social cues help viewers gain a better understanding of the message (Sproull & Kiesler, 1986).
“Whom”
The effect of persuasive materials may change depending on the characteristics of the audience. If audiences are more distracted during the persuasion process, they can be persuaded less (Aronson, Wilson, & Sommers, 2019). Strategies such as animation and fast-moving objects are used in our video to attract the audience’s attention, while strategies are also in place for individuals using the central route of persuasion as mentioned in the previous paragraph, with viewers being university students who have prior knowledge in this matter (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986).
We also kept in mind that our viewers were mostly individuals from the West Midlands area. This is the ideal demographic to influence as they have been reported as having the lowest expenditure during sales in the United Kingdom (Rotstein, 2018). This means that these individuals would be more accepting to messages of planned and careful spending, causing them to be most likely to be persuaded (Nickerson, 1998). Being located in the Midlands means that they can create a central hub of influence, allowing them to be a social contagion for the other regions of the United Kingdom (Christakis & Fowler, 2007).
Source: finder.com/uk
How behaviour changes can be measured and future improvements
Behaviour change measurements
We obtained comments from our viewers note that most of them learnt at least one new thing from the video and was able to identify a specific pitfall they have once fell for and would look to not do so again in the future by applying one or more of the tips provided.
A longitudinal study whereby participants would report their spending on the previous Black Friday sale before watching the video. After which, viewers are asked again after the next Black Friday sale to report their spending again and if they recalled or applied the video they watched during the sale.
As our social influence is limited, our video was not as far-reaching as we would have wanted. If a successful national campaign is established, one could compare the statistics with regards to spending amounts before and after such a campaign to measure this behaviour change.
Future improvements
Clearly, such a huge problem cannot be curbed by our project alone. From researching this topic we’ve found many other variables that have contributed to this pandemic that we could not include in our 3-min video without keeping it succinct. Our consumeristic mindset is one that is ingrained in our evolutionary beings, having the need to gain resources for survival. This is worsened by the idolisation of shopping hauls as done by social influencers, further solidifying the endless acquisition of resources as a cultural norm.
With respect to this project alone, a future video with more experts not only quoted but interviewed to discuss this topic and give advice would cause a greater impact, as interviews would cause it to be more salient, especially with people of authority.
With respect to global change, there is a need for regulations that govern the transparency of online marketing. With so many advertisement traps that are causing financial problems worldwide, retailers need to be put in check and not employ deceptive schemes such as the aforementioned “dynamic pricing”.
There is also a need to recognise online shopping addiction as a serious addiction. Currently, it is not being given the necessary attention in research, but with the severe consequences this addiction has on the economic and emotional wellbeing of those who have it, this should be rectified. These individuals need to be educated on the potential pitfalls while being guided through their financial debt.
Reference
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Introduction
With the rise of online shopping has come the rise of compulsive and often unnecessary spending, as shoppers are often lured into a multitude of sales and deals. Online payments have made it more convenient to view a greater variety of items, with a reduced sense of guilt in the absence of physical cash transactions (Michael’s House, 2018). Elizabeth Cline, the author of Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, commented on this phenomenon, saying “There’s no reason not to shop—because clothing is so cheap, you feel like, ‘Why not?’ There’s nothing lost in terms of the hit on your bank account” (Semuels, 2018).
Online shopping also provides shoppers with a double hit of euphora - once when the purchase is made, and again when the product arrives (Semuels, 2018). These sensations of euphoria can create dependencies, and this vice being so readily available can in turn lead to a rise in the prevalence of online shopping addictions. With more and more shoppers falling into the trap of online shopping, there is a need to become more aware of how our proclivities and inclinations are being exploited and manipulated by vendors, and how we can prevent developing compulsive shopping habits which lead us to purchase items we do not need.
Retalier's Tactics
Dr Gareth Harvey has highlighted the use of pressure-inducing strategies to increase shoppers’ anxieties so that they may make purchases with less deliberation (Wearn, 2018). This includes techniques such as clock countdowns, and notifications about limited stock or other viewers of your item. By making shoppers feel as if they are in competition with others, or on the brink of missing out on a sale, they are more likely to check their items out faster, which increases the likelihood of making unnecessary purchases (Mai, 2016). Prices on items are also adjusted according to consumer and market behaviour to drive sales, which means that during events such as Black Friday, you are not necessarily securing as great of a discount as advertised (Useem, 2017). The flexibility of the vendor’s ability to alter the price of their product begs to question whether the so-called original price has been tampered with to make the deal appear more lucrative, which is often the case.
Conditional offers are also employed by vendors to encourage you to buy more items than you may have originally intended. Offers such as getting a percentage off of your total bill, being offered free shipping after you exceed a certain amount, or buying more items to get another item free are some examples (Mai, 2016). This can encourage shoppers close to the threshold to spend even more money to claim the perceived deal, resulting in the acquisition of unnecessary goods. Shopper Claire Nicholas commented, "I'm a sucker for a deal - especially on kids clothes - and I'll add stuff to my basket to get the free shipping". Psychological tricks such as these are usually employed to clear stock, not to provide shoppers with a genuine bargain, and thus should be made aware of (Mehrotra, 2018).
Why the problem is important
The severity of the problem can be broken down into two aspects: current magnitude and future implications.
Current Magnitude
According to the National Retail Federation, the 2017 Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales attracted consumer spending of a whopping $682 billion, with £4.5 billion spent in the United Kingdom alone (Big Island Now, 2018). This puts the average amount spent per shopper in the United Kingdom at around £304, with 21% of shoppers later regretting the items they had purchased, a misstep amounting to an estimated average of £83 per person (Rotstein, 2018). This sudden spike in reckless spending has placed many already financially distressed individuals into further trouble, setting half of them back in repayments by three months or more (Business Report, 2017).
Future Implications
The more worrying issue is the upward trend that is being observed in reckless spending, which has been noted to be cross-generational. According to recent statistics, 18-35-year-olds are most likely to regret a purchase, with 30% wasting an average of £68 on these purchases. However, whilst a fewer percentage of Gen X’s regret a purchase, their reckless spending averages a mighty £112 of the age-high £264 overall spending average (Rotstein, 2018). As reckless spending can therefore be interpreted as an indiscriminately prevalent rather than being age-specific, more efforts have to be made to curb this pandemic before it becomes even more widespread.
Source: finder.com/uk
Our Intervention
To demonstrate the issue of unnecessary spending, we made a video that can be categorised into 2 main parts.
Firstly, we provided the viewer with context, showing the background of the issue. Starting with animation, we demonstrated the internal dialogue one may have when viewing sales and making online purchases. The viewer is then presented with a video, showing a young adult receiving a large quantity of delivered items, before realising she may have purchased items that she did not actually need, which is met with regret. Afterwards, the scene cuts back to animation, presenting the problem with statistics and facts on consumer spending and behaviour to do with unnecessary spending. We then provide three tips on how to prevent and overcome this issue.
The video was then uploaded to various social media outlets such as YouTube, Facebook, WeChat. We then measured the extent of behavioural change through the comments left on the video, as well as interviews with the viewers.
The target audience and how our project is tailored for them
Target audience
Our target audience is online sale shoppers aged between the ages of 18-35, as it is this age group which had the biggest proportion (30%) of people regretting purchases they had made. This age group is also old enough to have the largest scope of influence, being both young and malleable in their behaviour, and would be therefore less resistant to change. This was in line with our social groups of influence, being individuals within that age range. Our social influence also largely consisted of students attending the University of Warwick.
Tailored
With the busy lifestyles and short attention spans of this age group, we decided to create a short and succinct video to put forth our message before losing the interest of our viewers. With the media input of this age group coming from electronic devices, which are commonplace in the lives of young adults, this medium was seen as a better alternative compared to physical forms of media. The video also contains scenarios and lexis that are relatable to those in this age group.
Psychological and persuasion techniques used in your project
With many of the persuasion techniques overlapping one another, we decided to use the Yale Approach as our fundamental framework of analysis, whilst adding various other techniques such as the Elaboration Likelihood Model, Availability Heuristics, Implementations Intentions, to name a few.
Yale Approach
The Yale Approach can be summarised as "who said what to whom": the source, the message and the audience (Hovland, Janis & Kelley, 1953). According to this approach, many factors can be attributed to the persuasion process, for example, the credibility and attractiveness of the source, the quality and vividness of the message, and the intelligence and age of the audience (Aronson, Wilson, & Sommers, 2019). It also incorporates many other persuasion techniques that will be explained below.
“Who”
The persuasiveness by the source of the message can be increased in many aspects. Firstly, we addressed the credibility of the source. Credibility can be represented in both expertness, which is how much knowledge the source has in the field or the trustworthiness which indicates the intention of the source (Riley, Hovland, Janis & Kelley, 1954). Studies from Hovland and Weiss (1951) suggested that participants are more easily to be influenced by a prestigious journal than by an ordinary magazine. Priester and Petty (1995) also found that people are more easily persuaded by a trustworthy source than by someone who could be seen to be acting in their own personal interest. By quoting statistics from established organisations such as the National Retail Federation, we increase the credibility of our source instead of using a source lacking in substantiation (Big Island Now, 2018). These statistics are also that of the United Kingdom, making them more relatable to our largely Britain-based viewers. As the video was made by Psychology students without external funding, this eliminates the possibility of subjective bias in our research and message, thus enhancing the trustworthiness of our project as it would be seen to act more objectively in the interests of the community. Representing an esteemed university such as the University of Warwick also improves the perceived credibility of our work. In addition to this, we made use of quotes from Professor Thomas Hills, a behavioural professor at the University of Warwick who specialises in decision making, increasing the credibility of our video through the inclusion of a figure of authority (Milgram, 1963).
Quoting a familiar authoritative figure such as Professor Thomas Hills also creates a sense of relatability, increasing compliance with a phenomenon known as The Similarity Effect (Baskett, 1973). This effect suggests that we are more likely to be persuaded by an individual we deem to be more similar or recognisable to us. As students from the University of Warwick, our viewers would mainly consist of other students from the same institution. This would enhance the impact of our authority figure compared to another professor from a different university. Our video also included a short clip of one of our female groupmates imitating a shopping spree. By doing so, we mimic a situation that the viewer is likely to have experienced before, with most shoppers being female. In addition, the actor in a clip was an attractive yet down-to-earth female, increasing persuasion with the attractiveness of the source (Aronson, Wilson, & Sommers, 2019).
With most viewers already aware of possible previous purchases that they have regretted, the tips presenting in our video evoke a practical image of an improved self that one could and would want to, strive to become. This is in line with the Yale approach whereby the viewer would be more easily persuaded (Hovland, Janis, & Kelley, 1953).
“What”
The content of our video aspires to target individuals using both processing systems, depending on their ability and motivation to process the information. The Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) by Petty and Cacioppo (1986) suggests how a consumer’s personality and external factors could affect one’s information processing which ultimately influences the behaviour in e-commerce (Pickard et al., 2012). Petty and Cacioppo (1986) believed that when people are triggered to think under the peripheral route, they rely on heuristics or external cues to make the decisions. The cues can be affected by its attractiveness and credibility of the source of the message, both of which has been covered in this video (Miller, 2002). Our video is also short and succinct, coupled with flashy images, making it easier to process for those without the ability or motivation to pay attention.
Viewers using the central route of persuasion have the ability and motivation to pay attention to a given stimulus (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). Our video uses a problem-solution pattern, a proven effective structure for a reasoned argument. By having the video in a sequential pattern, one can follow the steps, similar to that of a recipe. The use of not only statistics but also of specific negative statistics such as “wasting an average of £68 on items you end up regretting” not only makes it personally relevant but also plays on viewer’s loss aversion (Tversky & Kahneman, 1991; Wegener et al., 2009). We also introduce the common ‘dilemma’ that consumers will often face, being ‘my old stuff still works, but the new one I have always wanted is a lot cheaper now’, to echo those who have experienced this in the past or are currently facing this situation now, increasing its personal relevance.
In our video, we highlighted specific pitfalls and tips to combat the issue of unnecessary spending. Some examples bring up the use of conditional offers of buying more to receive a discount off of the total price or highlighting scarcity or the competition of other buyers, causing one to make decisions quickly without making sense of the full picture (Caildini, 2001). We also played on “in-group bias” using words such as “traps” by retailers to instil a sense of viewers being the out-group, causing them as consumers do not want to benefit the retailers as willingly as before (Tajfel et al., 1979). Our last tip uses the Implementation Intention by asking viewers to make a specific shopping list and to the only search for those items. This entails noting down when they are going to shop, how they are going to shop, and what to look for when they shop, which in turn decreases the likelihood of overspending (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006). All these specific examples and points mirror the pique technique, citing that the more specific a request is, the higher the degree of compliance (Santos, Leve, & Pratkanis, 1994). This allows for increased ease of retrieval in their availability heuristic, causing viewers to easily recall these points when they are faced with similar situations (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973). The tips were confined to a few points at the end of the video to play on the recency effect (Baddeley, 1976).
In addition, the video is constructed in a powerful linguistic style, as Holtgraves and Lasky (1999) found that a message is less persuasive when given in a powerless linguistic style, which tends to include more hedges, tag questions and hesitations. Previous studies suggested that powerless speech could result in the speaker or the argument being perceived as less attractive and less credible (Erickson, Lind, Johnson, & Obarr, 1978). Furthermore, viewers can pick up on non-verbal behaviours such as smiling, a tone of voice and eye contact to help them perceive the right message (Kiesler et al., 1984). Studies found that when information is low in vividness, it is less likely to attract attention from consumers, while social cues help viewers gain a better understanding of the message (Sproull & Kiesler, 1986).
“Whom”
The effect of persuasive materials may change depending on the characteristics of the audience. If audiences are more distracted during the persuasion process, they can be persuaded less (Aronson, Wilson, & Sommers, 2019). Strategies such as animation and fast-moving objects are used in our video to attract the audience’s attention, while strategies are also in place for individuals using the central route of persuasion as mentioned in the previous paragraph, with viewers being university students who have prior knowledge in this matter (Petty & Cacioppo, 1986).
We also kept in mind that our viewers were mostly individuals from the West Midlands area. This is the ideal demographic to influence as they have been reported as having the lowest expenditure during sales in the United Kingdom (Rotstein, 2018). This means that these individuals would be more accepting to messages of planned and careful spending, causing them to be most likely to be persuaded (Nickerson, 1998). Being located in the Midlands means that they can create a central hub of influence, allowing them to be a social contagion for the other regions of the United Kingdom (Christakis & Fowler, 2007).
Source: finder.com/uk
How behaviour changes can be measured and future improvements
Behaviour change measurements
We obtained comments from our viewers note that most of them learnt at least one new thing from the video and was able to identify a specific pitfall they have once fell for and would look to not do so again in the future by applying one or more of the tips provided.
A longitudinal study whereby participants would report their spending on the previous Black Friday sale before watching the video. After which, viewers are asked again after the next Black Friday sale to report their spending again and if they recalled or applied the video they watched during the sale.
As our social influence is limited, our video was not as far-reaching as we would have wanted. If a successful national campaign is established, one could compare the statistics with regards to spending amounts before and after such a campaign to measure this behaviour change.
Future improvements
Clearly, such a huge problem cannot be curbed by our project alone. From researching this topic we’ve found many other variables that have contributed to this pandemic that we could not include in our 3-min video without keeping it succinct. Our consumeristic mindset is one that is ingrained in our evolutionary beings, having the need to gain resources for survival. This is worsened by the idolisation of shopping hauls as done by social influencers, further solidifying the endless acquisition of resources as a cultural norm.
With respect to this project alone, a future video with more experts not only quoted but interviewed to discuss this topic and give advice would cause a greater impact, as interviews would cause it to be more salient, especially with people of authority.
With respect to global change, there is a need for regulations that govern the transparency of online marketing. With so many advertisement traps that are causing financial problems worldwide, retailers need to be put in check and not employ deceptive schemes such as the aforementioned “dynamic pricing”.
There is also a need to recognise online shopping addiction as a serious addiction. Currently, it is not being given the necessary attention in research, but with the severe consequences this addiction has on the economic and emotional wellbeing of those who have it, this should be rectified. These individuals need to be educated on the potential pitfalls while being guided through their financial debt.
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