The emotional power of defeats

Do you think that team defeats are not such a big deal for a fan? Listen to this fan who broke down while calling a talk radio. It's hard not to feel bad for him. I also doubt that he ate only broccoli after that.

Is your favorite football team making you fat?

My paper with Yann Cornil (our star PhD student here at INSEAD) has been published online (download it here).

In this paper, we show that defeats by your favorite football (or soccer) team make you eat more and less healthy food, especially if they were narrow, unexpected, and against an opponent of the same strength. The flip side is that victories make us eat slightly better. Fortunately if you are rooting for a losing team, there is a simple solution if you want to eat healthily: After a defeat, reflect on what is important to you (maybe your family, God, or...another sport). This self-affirmation will eliminate the effects of the defeat.


Cornil, Yann and Pierre Chandon (2013) “From Fan to Fat? Vicarious Losing Increases Unhealthy Eating, but Self-Affirmation Is an Effective Remedy,” Psychological Science. Access the paper here.

Here are some mentions in the press:

• MinnPost (very detailed article)
• Chicago Tribune (editorial)
• Daily Mail
• Financial Times
• Telegraph
• Discovery Channel
• The Scientist
• La Stampa (in Italian)
• La Vanguardia (in Spanish)
• La Presse (in French)
• Libération (in French)
• Milliyet (in Turkish)
• etc.

Are you at risk of eating junk food after a defeat? Take the test and see if you are at risk of going from fan to fat!

My latest case “L’Oréal in China: Marketing Strategies for Turning Around Chinese Luxury Cosmetic Brand Yue Sai” is out!

This case was written with Haiyang Yang, INSEAD PhD 2013, who will join the Carey School of Management of John Hopkins University in July 2013. 

This multimedia case study contains video interviews and television commercials which can be viewed at www.insead.edu/facultyresearch/loreal-china. 

Instructors can order the case and teaching note from www.ecch.com. The teaching note contains the username and password that instructors will use to access a lot of additional information, including interviews of the Alexis Perakis-Valat, the CEO of L'Oréal China, Stéphane Wilmet, the General Manager of Yue Sai, Ronnie Liang, Yue Sai's marketing director, and interviews of consumers, retailers, and journalist about Yue Sai’s bold repositioning and its strong results. The website also contains an extensive PowerPoint presentation for instructors. 

The case allows students to better understand the challenges of doing business in China, including how cultural beliefs and rising national pride influence Chinese consumers’ attitudes toward Chinese and Western luxury brands. It also addresses important general business dilemmas, such as (1) the need to adapt to local markets and (2) the trade-off between functional and lifestyle value propositions.

The case can be used in an undergraduate, MBA, or executive education course on marketing management, marketing strategy, brand management, international marketing, international business, or other related subject. A Chinese version of the case will be available shortly.

Enjoy the case!

 

Interview on Télématin (France2) about package sizes and shapes

Here is a link to my May 1 interview on French TV on why today's large and especially designed soda cups and glasses make us drink more than we realize (in French).

Glad to be interviewed on the Wall Street Journal TV on how package sizes make us mindlessly overeat.



You can access the full WSJ article here

In this short video, my co-author Nailya Odabayeva demonstrates how our brain, because it adds the changes in height, width, and length of objects instead of multiplying them, fails to notice even large downsizing when the package is elongated.




This video was produced by Peter McGraw (check out his blog), another marketing professor but at the University of Colorado. 

The paper is forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing. You can already download the paper here. You can download the Excel Macro that will help you determine the optimal dimensions to obtain the desired size impression here.

Ordabayeva, Nailya and Pierre Chandon (2013) “Predicting and Managing Consumers’ Package Size Impressions.” Journal of Marketing.

Featured in film about the food industry

Remy Burkel wrote an interesting 52 minute documentary about the food industry during which he interviewed Kelly Brownell, many food scientists. I had recreated several famous experiments for him in our behavioral lab in Paris (www.inseadlab.com) but, in the end, only appeared during a short sequence filmed in a supermarket outside Fontainebleau.

To watch the movie, go to: http://www.france2.fr/emissions/infrarouge/diffusions/26-03-2013_40994. It can also be viewed in many ways on Youtube including here

New publication on the effects of packaging on overeating

My latest paper "How Package Design and Packaged-based Marketing Claims Lead to Overeating," is now publicly available, free of charge, on the site of Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy. You can download the pdf here.

Here is the abstract:

Because packaging reaches consumers at the critical moments of purchase and consumption, it has become an important marketing tool for food manufacturers and retailers. In this paper I review a number of published studies on marketing, nutrition and public health on the effects of packaging-based communication and design on perceptions of food and its consumption. I first review how the marketing, health and nutrition claims on packaging create “health halos” (i.e., make foods appear healthier than they are) lead to higher consumption yet lower perceived calorie intake. I then show how packaging cues, shapes and sizes bias people’s perception of quantity and increase their preference for supersized packages and portions that appear smaller than they are. Finally, I review the evidence on the effectiveness of public policies designed to limit the biasing effects of packaging on food perceptions and preferences.