1. M&M’s as food for will increase. Vosgerau illustrated this with the fol-
lowing example: if we imagine ourselves eating a
thought at the K.U. perfectly cooked steak, our desire to eat it increa-
ses. Similarly, when smokers think of the taste and
Leuven Marketing smell of a cigarette, their desire for a cigarette will
increase.
Winter Camp
This being said Vosgerau and his colleagues found,
contrary to the commonly held believes, that ima-
On December 9, K.U. Leuven held their annual Mar- gined consumption reduces the actual consump-
keting Winter Camp. It was an interesting day with tion. In their experiment participants were either
a set of speakers coming from different disciplines. asked to imagine eating M&M’s or to imagine per-
This guaranteed sufficient variety in topics and forming another action (in this case inserting coins
ensured that the attention of the crowd did not in a laundry machine). The participants were as-
wane. For example, the talk by Tom Wenseleers, signed by the researchers to either imagine to eat
who is an Associate Professor of Entomology at a lot of M&M’s or only a small amount. The same
K.U. Leuven. He gave some insight in the evolution goes for imagining inserting the coins into the
of competition and cooperation in insect societies. laundry machine. Afterwards each participant was
offered a bowl of M&M’s, of which they could eat as
much as they wanted.
“Thought for Food.”
As it turned out those participants who imagined
consuming more M&M’s, ate less of it than those
who had imagined consuming less M&M’s. The re-
search also showed that this effect is specific to the
Another presentation that stood out was that of food that was imagined to be consumed. In other
Joachim Vosgerau. He is an Associate Professor of words imagining eating M&M’s will not have an ef-
Marketing at the Tepper School of Business at Car- fect on the (actual) consumption of other types of
negie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylva- food.
nia. He held a presentation cleverly titled: “Thought
for Food”. He does research on how imagined con- At the end of the Winter Camp I had a satisfied fee-
sumption can influence actual consumption. The ling: I had learned a bunch of new things and I was
common belief is that when people think about intellectually challenged. Yet there was one small
a certain food item they want, their desire for it thing that was lingering in my mind: the presen-

2. tations often had a strong academic undertone.
A lot of attention was paid to the set-up and the
techniques used in the research. This forces the
researchers to make an abstraction of the reality,
which is of course needed to create a controlled
setting. Nevertheless, a great deal of information
and validity of the research is lost because of the
simplification of the real world.
Often there are only a handful of factors that have
to mimic the entire reality. Furthermore in a con-
trolled setting a participant does not behave in the
same way, as he would in the real world. The results
of this fundamental research and experiments are
very insightful and will undoubtedly prove to be
very useful to all market researchers.
But I do believe that applied market research has a
high added value because it works with the world
as it is and tries to understand people in all their
complexity.
MOTIVATIONAL
RESEARCH
JAN
2012
by Dries Dekeukeleire
Researcher @ WHY5Research