How Packaging Makes us Fat: Volume Estimation Heuristics and Size Preferences

The Centre for Multidisciplinary Behavioural Business Research at the John Molson School of Business and the Concordia University Research Chair in Consumer Research present: Pierre Chandon, Professor of Marketing, The L'Oréal Chaired Professor of Marketing Innovation and Creativity & Director, INSEAD Social Sciences Research Centre, Paris, France.

Date	Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Time	4 p.m.
Location	Concordia University MB Building, Room MB 6.255 (6th floor) 1450 Guy Street (corner of de Maisonneuve Blvd. West), Montreal, Quebec. View map
Open to	This presentation is open to all members of Concordia University and local universities.
Given the current concerns about overconsumption, understanding consumer response to product supersizing and downsizing is an important issue for policy makers, consumer researchers, and marketers. In this presentation, I will first examine how people intuitively estimate volume changes. Across a series of experiments and field studies, I will show that people strongly underestimate size changes, particularly when packages and portions change in three vs. two vs. just one spatial dimensions (height, width, and length). I will also show that these errors occur not because people miss that some dimensions are changing, but because they add instead of multiplying the changes in height, width, length. Drawing on these results, I show that marketers can manage perceptions of product supersizing and downsizing, can influence how much people use, how much they are willing to pay, and what size they prefer.
Pierre Chandon
	Pierre Chandon's primary research interests focus on the effects of marketing (in particular, packaging and nutrition claims) on food choices. He has published in marketing journals, such as Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, Foundations and Trends in Marketing, but also in nutrition and medical journals, such as Obesity, Nutrition Reviews, and Annals of Internal Medicine. His research has been the subject of media coverage in Europe and in the US by, among others, The New York Times, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, USA Today, ABC, CBS, FOX, France2, M6, Cosmopolitan, and the Rush Limbaugh show.

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For more information, please contact:

Dr. H. Onur Bodur, Director
Centre for Multidisciplinary Behavioural Business Research
John Molson School of Business
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The Centre for Multidisciplinary Behavioural Business Research (CMBBR) Visiting Speaker Series provides exposure to multidisciplinary research and an opportunity to expand cross-discipline networks.