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Overcoming Neophobia

Disciplines > Retail > Overcoming Neophobia

Neophobia and the recognition heuristic | Ways to alleviate neophobia | See also

Daniel Goldstein at the Max Planck institute has identified a recognition heuristic that is used in cases of neophobia, and identifies three ways that brand managers and retailers can cope with this constraint.

Although 'new' can be worrying, it can also be fun and stimulating. You just want to recognize neophobia and then make sure that such people are approached carefully. For others, novelty may be a positive attribute on which you can sell.

Neophobia and the recognition heuristic

Neophobia is 'fear of the new' and appears in consumers when they are faced with an unrecognized brand. In the way that we look for familiar and safe solutions when faced with uncertainty, consumers will choose familiar brands over new or unfamiliar brands. This method of 'safety of the known' is the recognition heuristic.

People thus assess known brands as 'better', for example, known airlines are believed to be safer. In a laboratory taste test, unwitting participants preferred a better-tasting peanut butter only 20% of the time when it was given an unfamiliar brand label but liked a worse-tasting product 73% of the time when they thought it was a recognized brand.

Ways to alleviate neophobia

1. Give them more time to assess and decide

If you give the consumer more time to look at and consider the new brands then they will have less reason to use the quick heuristic.

One way of doing this is to put unfamiliar products in in-store 'havens' where the consumer can consider the product on its own, without comparison.

2. Provide comparison tables

A comparison table typically draws out a list of attributes and then indicates how each product compares against the attribute. This may be a simple check mark to show whether each products has or does not have the attribute. It can also be a score of some kind.

Although it is not necessary, it can also help credibility if there is some indication of neutrality in the scoring.

3. Change the category

Finally, you can effectively create a new category for the new product. Thus a new magazine targeted at office staff might be framed as a 'light business journal' rather than as a 'glossy magazine'.

The principle with this is that if the consumer does not recognize the category, they will not be able to select a known brand against which to compare it.

See also

The need for novelty

Goldstein, D.G. (2007). Getting Attention for Unrecognized Brands, Harvard Business Review, March 2007