Payment Methods and Product Perception
I recently ran across an interesting article in the Journal of Consumer Research. In it, the researchers looked at the effect of your payment methods (credit card vs. cash) on how you evaluate a product (benefits vs. costs).
The authors argue that the so-called “credit card premium” - i.e., the fact that using a credit card increases the average consumer's propensity to spend - is due in part to the effect that using credit has on your perception/evaluation of products.
They found, for example, that study participants “primed” with a credit card (i.e., given word puzzles that involved terms related to credit cards) were less able to recall details related to product costs than those that were primed with cash. And yet, the credit card priming had no effect on the ability to recall product benefits.
Likewise, individuals primed with a credit card tended to identify more words related to the benefits of a product as opposed to costs when they did a computerized word recognition study. Those primed with cash did the opposite.
In a third study, individuals primed with credit cards were found to respond more quickly to benefits than to costs when given a product description and asked to press one button if they heard a benefit, and another button if they heard a cost. Cash-primed individuals were the opposite.
And finally… They found that consumers will preferentially select a product with superior benefits when primed with credit concepts, but a product that is superior cost-wise when primed with cash concepts.
In other words, it seems that dealing with cash (or at least cash concepts) makes you more price sensitive, whereas dealing with credit (or at least credit concepts) make you more sensitive to perceived quality.
In terms of big picture implications, they argued that:
and that such effects could even have health consequences:
Food for thought…
Source: Journal of Consumer Research
The original article can be found at FiveCentNickel.com:Payment Methods and Product Perception