The placebo effect of marketing. Investigating the effect of price on consumption experience

Scientific Essay from the year 2020 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: 1,0, Copenhagen Business School, language: English, abstract: Several studies investigated how marketing actions can affect consumers' product perception and thereby evoke a placebo effect. Notably, Irmak et al. (2005) were able to trigger identical objective body reactions for a product and its placebo. This suggests that manipulating marketing stimuli can not only alter subjective perceptions, but also objective physical product responses. This is in line with the inconsistent quality perceptions of NBs and PLs and leads to this paper's research problem: What are the subconscious processes that explain how price impacts subjective taste experiences? Taste experiences are closely linked to quality assessments which are both crucial for purchase decisions, thereby impacting a company's financial outcomes. It is thus relevant for marketers to understand how consumers derive their evaluations and how external attributes can affect them in a placebo-like manner. For this reason, the research question will be accompanied by a review of how neuroscientific approaches can add to the understanding of the placebo effect and how it can be leveraged by marketers.