I suggested ways to improve how we measure brands, using recent findings in cognitive psychology which detail how psychological distance distorts the way in which we assess things.

1. IPA Excellence Diploma, Module 4
Jean Francois Hector, @jfhector
I believe the future of brand measurement lies in taking
into account the distorting effect of psychological distance
To track a brand’s health we must generally make the assumption that consumer attitudes
elicited in quantitative surveys are decent proxies for how they’ll think about the product at
the moment of purchase.
We know that preferences elicited this way are pretty poor predictors of a brand’s future
sales 1 , but we generally blame that on hard-to-measure contextual factors coming into
play at the moment of purchase and ‘distorting’ people’s choices away from their ‘natural’
preferences 2 .
I’d like to suggest that something else is also at play: a growing body of findings in
cognitive psychology suggest that preferences change in systematic, predictable ways as
a function of ‘psychological distance’ 3.
I believe that this has major implications for brand measurement, and I’d like to suggest
how brand attitudes and preferences can be measured in more reliable and useful ways.
Word count: 1,198
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2. Preference reversals can be explained by changes in 'psychological distance'
Liberman & Trope 4 observed that preferences change, not only depending on the context,
but also in a systematic way over time.
They proposed an explanation that hinges on the concept of ‘psychological distance’:
the same proposition is evaluated in completely different ways depending on
whether it’s considered for the distant or near future, and on whether the choice is
hypothetical or real (e.g. a marketing survey vs a real purchase situation) 5 .
What happens is that different aspects of a choice (eg. desirability, price) are given more
or less weight depending on whether the decision is considered from a psychologically
distant or near perspective.
In particular, considering a choice for the distant future or hypothetically makes high-
level, abstract aspects more salient and low-level, concrete aspects less salient 6.
This cognitive illusion happens unconsciously and is due to the fact that the more distant
or hypothetical something feels, the more abstractly we construe it and process
information related to it 7 .
A psychologically distant perspective makes high-level, abstract
aspects more salient and low-level, concrete aspects less salient
Psychologically
near perspective
Psychologically
distant perspective
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3. Distance and hypotheticality distort the relative weight that different product
features are given in the assessment
Which are a product/brand’s high-level and low-level features?
‘Low-level’ doesn’t mean less important, but less abstract and of lower order from a
cognitive point of view8. Indeed, the low-level features that become less salient from a
psychologically distant perspective (eg. the price) are often quite crucial for making good
decisions.
Specifically, a more psychologically distant perspective gives more weight to core
features compared to peripheral features 9 , emphasises desirability concerns over
feasibility concerns, makes pros more salient than cons and prioritises high-minded
principles and values over pragmatic concerns.
Concerns relating to a product’s ‘feasibility’ (e.g. its price, how readily usable it is) are
generally subordinate to its desirability, and are less salient when the choice is considered
from a psychologically distant perspective 10 11 12.
For example when considering whether or not to book a fancy villa in Spain, the fanciness
of the villa will have a greater weight relative to its price if the holiday is to take place next
year vs next week 13 . This distortion happens in spite of the fact that the price is well
known in advance 14 .
Similarly cons are subordinate to pros 15 . Getting a bigger house out of town may seem
worth the longer commute at the time of signing the papers, but this preference is typically
reversed once you have to suffer the commute every day 16 17 . Also, it’s harder to think of
arguments against a given proposal if it is only to be implemented in the distant future (vs
if it takes effect immediately) 18 .
Accordingly, it’s been repeatedly observed that high-minded principles and values are
more readily applied to psychologically distant situations than to psychologically near
situations 19 20 21 22 .
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4. Desirablity aspects vs feasibility aspects
Renting a fancy, pricy villa in Spain: worth it or not?
Considered from a psychologically distant perspective Considered from a psychologically near perspective
(ie. if the holiday is to take place next year) (ie. if the holiday is to take place next week)
Desirability Feasibility Desirability Feasibility
aspect aspect aspects aspects
fanciness price fanciness price
+ +
- ✔ - ✘
A psychologically distant perspective de-emphasises feasibility Looking at the same decision from a psychologically
aspects while maintaining desirability aspects: that’s why it’s near perspective makes feasibility aspects more
not a good idea to book fancy villas too much in advance. salient: clearly it’s not worth it.
High-level features - low-level features
core features - peripheral features
Eg. for a stereo: sound quality - design of the time display
Eg. when buying a car: model of the car - type of paint
desirability - feasibility
Eg. for a holiday villa: fanciness - price
Eg. for a lecture: it’s topic - how convenient the timing is
Eg. for a CD give-away: more CDs - more convenient location
pros - cons
Eg. deciding whether to move out of town: extra space - longer commute
Eg. getting plastic surgery: bigger everything - risks of rupture
high-minded principles and values - pragmatic concerns
Eg. getting on a London Bike: getting fit - avoiding being late
Eg. deciding which DVD player to get: more eco-friendly - better value
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5. Application: making better inferences from brand measurement
These findings help us understand what brand attitudes tracking studies capture, and what
they don’t capture.
The problem is that when answering brand tracking surveys, respondents assess
products/brands from a psychologically distant perspective, whilst in real purchase
situations the same products/brands are assessed from a psychologically near
perspective.
This means that brand attitudes and preferences captured in surveys are distorted in
a systematic way: they are driven by core features much more than peripheral features,
desirability concerns much more than feasibility concerns, pros much more than cons and
high-minded principles/values much more than pragmatic concerns.
Bearing this in mind avoids drawing the wrong conclusions from brand metrics:
• Consumer attitudes surveys are likely to under-estimate brands whose strengths lie in
their ‘feasibility’ or pragmatic aspects23, compared to brands whose strengths lie in
their desirability and high-minded or symbolic aspects.
• It’s likely that brand valuations are biased in the same way, as they rely partly on
elicited brand attitudes 24 .
• The full effect of ads highlighting feasibility or pragmatic concerns is likely to be
missed by quantitative surveys.
• It also suggests that what consumers tell us about the relative importance of different
product attributes is even less reliable than we thought.
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6. Application: better methods for eliciting brand attitudes and preferences
! a) Reducing psychological distance by recruiting differently
Quantitative survey methodologies could be improved by recruiting respondents as close
as possible before the moment of purchase – rather than people who are just open to the
idea of purchasing sometime in the future but aren’t thinking about it in concrete terms yet.
It’d also make it possible to compare their answers to their purchase decisions shortly
afterwards, providing helpful feedback as to the reliability of the findings.
! b) Reducing psychological distance by making choices feel less hypothetical
A solution more suited to small-ticket items would be to tell respondents that, whichever
product they rate the most highly, they have a 10% 25 chance of receiving soon after.
That product’s price could also be deducted from their cash incentive, forcing them to think
about the product as concretely and pragmatically as in real purchase situations 26.
Alternatively, at the end of surveys respondents could be invited to choose one of the
products to be sent to them, to see how their decision matches the elicited preferences.
! c) Priming respondents to approach the survey with a more concrete mindset
It’s well documented that repeatedly thinking in terms of “how” (vs. “why”) activates
concrete thinking (vs. abstract thinking) 27 .
At the beginning of surveys respondents could be asked to generate answers to the
question “why would someone exercise” or to the question “how would someone
exercise”28, depending on whether we want them to get into an abstract or concrete
thinking mindset.
! d) Controlling for how abstractly/concretely respondents approached the choices
! presented to them in the survey
The most established methods of checking whether someone is approaching a task with
an abstract thinking mindset or a concrete mindset are the Gestalt Completion Test 29
(people in an abstract thinking mindset tend to perform better), and the Snowy Pictures
Test 30 (people in a concrete thinking mindset tend to perform better).
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7. Conclusion
Psychological distance theory and the body of findings supporting it suggest that making a
choice for here and now and making a choice for the distant or hypothetical future are two
completely different decisions.
This has major implications for how we measure brand attitudes and preferences, as the
questions we ask consumers are generally hypothetical and situated in an undefined
future.
Although the existence of this bias has been clearly established, its effects on brand
measurement are yet to be researched at all.
This is surprising as psychological distance theory was formulated in 2003 and is now
widely recognised as a leading contemporary theory in psychology 31 . Over a thousand
articles have been written about it in academic journals 32 , but there seem to be none so
far in any advertising-related publications! 33
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8. 1Levels of consideration for a brand a more a reflection of past behaviour than a predictor of future sales.
Marketing and the Bottom Line – T Ambler, Pearson 2003
2Contextual explanations include: the particular way the choice is framed at the point of purchase
(Kahneman, Thaler), what comes to mind at the moment of purchase (Ehrenberg, Sharp), different states of
arousal (Thaler), or the specific decision shortcut that was use at the moment of purchase (Thaler)
3 Trope Y, Liberman N. Temporal construal. Psychological Review. 2003
4 Ibid.
5Their framework, called Construal Level Theory (CLT), has since gathered a lot of evidence support and is
now widely recognised as a leading contemporary theory in cognitive psychology. But surprisingly it has
never been applied to brand measurement.
6Yaacov Trope, Nira Liberman, Cheryl Wakslak – Construal Levels and Psychological Distance: Effects on
Representation, Prediction, Evaluation, and Behavior (J Consum Psychol 2007)
7 One experiment asked people to complete various tasks that required the abstraction of coherent images
from fragmented or noisy visual input (eg. Gestalt completion test). Their performances increased when they
imagined working on the task in the distant future as opposed to the near future, suggesting that temporal
distance facilitates abstract processing.
J Förster, RS Friedman, N Liberman – Temporal construal effects on abstract and concrete thinking:
Consequences for insight and creative cognition (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 2004).
8 Shimon Edelman – Computing the Mind (Oxford, 2010)
9A growing body of experiments suggest that core and peripheral features are weighed differently in near
and distant evaluations. One experiment participants had to choose between two radio sets: one with good
sound quality (primary feature) but a clock display (secondary feature) that was quite useless, or one model
with poor sound quality but a clock that was actually quite useful.
Results: participants who were asked to imagine buying a set in one year thought about the choice in more
abstract terms and overwhelmingly preferred the model with good sound quality but a poor clock (listening to
the radio is the primary use of a radio set ..), while participants asked to imaging buying a set the next day
thought about the choice in more concrete, practical terms and considered its more practical uses – they
showed on average the same amount of preference for either models.
Y Trope, N Liberman – Temporal construal and time-dependent changes in preference (Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology. 2000)
10 Participants in one study made decisions about three decision situations (e.g., deciding whether to attend
a guest lecture) that they imagined occurring to them in either the near or distant future. For each situation,
the desirability of the outcome (e.g., how interesting the lecture was) and its feasibility (e.g., how convenient
the timing of the lecture was) were varied between participants. Results revealed that the effect of desirability
increased over time, whereas the effect of feasibility decreased. Thus, the attractiveness of the options
increased or decreased as a function of the source of the attractiveness: when outcomes were desirable but
hard to obtain, attractiveness increased over time; when outcomes were less desirable but easy to obtain,
attractiveness decreased over time.
N Liberman, Y Trope – The role of feasibility and desirability considerations in near and distant future
decisions: A test of temporal construal theory (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 1998)
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9. 11 In another study, participants read about a series of promotional campaigns constructed so that they were
either high in desirability and low in feasibility (e.g., receiving 10 free CDs at an inconvenient location) or low
in desirability and high in feasibility (e.g., receiving 1 free CD at a convenient location). Under high
probability, participants were told that if they signed up for the campaign, they were almost certain to receive
a voucher for the company's products. Under low probability, they were told that they would have about a 1
in 100 chance of receiving a voucher.
Results: under low probability participants preferred the high desirability/low feasibility option over the low
desirability/high feasibility option, whereas under high probability they preferred the low desirability/high
feasibility option over the high desirability/low feasibility option. Thus, desirability was increasingly weighed
over feasibility as psychological distance increased (i.e., as probability diminished).
A Todorov, A Goren, Y Trope – Probability as a psychological distance: Construal and preference (Journal of
Experimental Social Psychology, 2007)
12 In yet another study, participants learned that a store they frequent was adding USB memory sticks to their
offerings. After reading about the product and submitting baseline purchase intentions, participants saw
information about a promotional offer for the memory stick. This information related either to the product's
desirability (the addition of an additional desirable feature at the same price) or to the product's feasibility (an
in-store coupon lowering the product's final price). Further, participants were either told to imagine deferring
the purchase (buying the product at a distant time point instead of now) or expediting the purchase (buying
the product at a near future time point instead of sometime later).
Results: when the purchase was moved to the near future, information about the price discount (feasibility)
increased purchase intentions but information about the additional feature (desirability) did not. In contrast,
when the purchase was moved to the distant future, desirability information increased purchase intentions
but feasibility information did not. These findings suggest that temporal distance augments the effects of
desirability information but discounts the effects of feasibility information.
M Thomas, S Chandran, Y Trope – The effects of temporal distance on purchase construal (Cornell
University, 2006)
13Klaus Fiedler – Construal Level Theory as an Integrative Framework for Behavioral Decision-Making
Research and Consumer Psychology (Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2007)
14As Trope and Liberman put it: "an association forms between psychological distance and abstraction, and
that this association is overgeneralized so that it influences representation even in situations where there is
equivalent information about near and distant events".
15 This is because the importance of pros does not depend upon the existence of cons, whereas cons are
only important when pros are present. Consider, for example, the decision to undergo a medical procedure.
If the procedure has no benefits, one would not inquire about its potential complications (one would simply
decide not to proceed). In contrast, one would inquire about the procedure's benefits whether or not there
were potential risks.
16Klaus Fiedler – Construal Level Theory as an Integrative Framework for Behavioral Decision-Making
Research and Consumer Psychology (Journal of consumer psychology, 2007)
17Rory Sutherland also used this example to illustrate one of his points at the Google Think Mobile event in
July: “One of the worst decisions you might make in your life is to move 20 miles out of town in order to get
an extra bedroom in your house. When you’re thinking about this new bigger house you can have what
happens is: your new bedroom, and the wonderful things you’ll do with it, are very high in your
consciousness while the pain-in-the-ass commute you’ll have to endure is very very low. When you actually
move to the new house. [...] This is how the narrow and peculiar focus of human attention distorts decision
making”.
18Participants generated arguments in favor and against new near future or distant future actions. They
generated relatively more pro arguments and fewer con arguments when the actions were to take place in
the more distant future. The proposed action involved new exam procedures (e.g., switching to open-ended
questions instead of multiple choice questions), social policies (e.g., restricting private cars in the city center),
and a variety of personal and interpersonal behaviors (e.g., approaching a fellow student and offering to write
an assignment together). In all the studies, participants generated more pros and less cons as temporal
distance from the actions increased.
T Eyal, N Liberman, M Sagristano, Y Trope – Time dependent effects of primary vs. secondary values on
behavioral intentions (Tel Aviv University, 2004)
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10. 19 To use an example that Rory Sutherland gave at the Google Think Mobile event in July: if you could book
a London Bike in advance, that decision would be a very different one than booking it for immediate use. In
one case, what you’re attention is focused on is high-minded considerations like fitness or the enjoyment of
the fresh air. In the other case, your attention is focused on more pragmatic concerns such as arriving on
time or spending as little time as possible under the rain.
20 Another example of Rory is relevant here: “if you tell somebody “if you win the lottery in 3 years time, and
ask to write a list of how they’d use the money, and pre-commit, it’ll be full of donations to the poor and
extraordinary generous treatment to their parents. But when you actually win the lottery, you tend to indulge
in a drug-fueled binge of total insanity”.
21In one study participants imagined finding a sale for DVD players either that week (near future condition)
or in three months (distant future condition). They then viewed a number of arguments endorsing the
purchase of a particular DVD player. For half of the participants, the argument list included a value-related
argument (the DVD player is made of environmentally-friendly materials), whereas for the other half, all the
arguments were value-neutral.
Results: product evaluations made by participants considering the purchase in the distant future were more
positive when the message included a value-related argument than when it consisted only of a value-neutral
argument. In contrast, when participants considered the purchase in the near future, evaluations did not
differ on the basis of inclusion of a value-related feature.
Thus, persuasive arguments appealing to idealistic values appear to be more persuasive for temporally
distant, as opposed to near, attitude objects.
K Fujita; T Eyal; S Chaiken – Influencing attitudes toward near and distant objects (Ohio State U; 2006)
22Another study was organised in two sessions. The first session measured participants’ general attitudes
toward a variety of activities (e.g., blood donation). In the second session the same participants were offered
an opportunity to engage in each of these activities in either the near future (the next two days) or the distant
future (several weeks later).
Results: participants’ general attitudes were better predictors of behavioral intentions for distant future
opportunities than for near future opportunities.
Sagristano, MD.; Trope, Y.; Eyal, T.; Liberman – How temporal distance affects attitude-behavior
correspondence (N. Florida Atlantic University; 2006)
23 eg. low end or private-label brands
24 T Ambler – Marketing and the Bottom Line (Pearson 2003)
25 Or maybe 1%
26FMCG needs to be low priced compared to the cash incentive, to avoid people dismissing the product as
unimportant to maximise their incentive
27
Agrawal, Nidhi and Echo Wen Wan – Regulating Risk or Risking Regulation? Construal Levels and
Depletion Effects in the Processing of Health Messages (Journal of Consumer Research, 2009)
28 (or any similar unrelated question, eg. work, exercise, etc.)
29 Respondents are presented with black fragments of a complete picture and told to structure the
information into a whole and close the visual gestalt. Ekstrom, French, Harman, & Dermen (1976)
Participants’ performances have been observed to increase when they imagine working on the task in the
distant future vs. the near future, suggesting that temporal distance not only leads one to adopt abstract-vs.
concrete-language-based representations, but also that it facilitates abstract processing generally.
Förster J, Friedman RS, Liberman N – Temporal construal effects on abstract and concrete thinking:
Consequences for insight and creative cognition (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 2004)
30 A Snowy Pictures Test asks participants to name a picture hidden beneath visual noise.
31Klaus Fiedler – Construal Level Theory as an Integrative Framework for Behavioral Decision-Making
Research and Consumer Psychology (in Journal of Consumer Psychology, 2007)
32 Based on this Google Scholar search: http://bit.ly/x3oafQ
33 Based on this WARC search there’s just one article mentioning CLT in passing: http://bit.ly/xSAum0
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