From craft beer to farmers markets and artisan bread, many current marketplace trends suggest that consumers are seeking to go back to the local, personal and traditional. In their forthcoming publication “Connecting to Place, People, and Past: How Products Make Us Feel Grounded” in the A+ ranked Journal of Marketing, Isabel Eichinger (WU), Martin Schreier (WU), and Stijn van Osselaer (Cornell University) explain how the need to feel grounded underlies this consumer behavior, and why marketers should care.

Their studies show that “feeling grounded” makes consumers feel happier as well as stronger, safer, more stable, and better able to withstand adversity. Groundedness is also a promising concept for marketers: the studies show that products are more attractive to consumers when they make them feel more grounded. In an incentive-compatible experiment, participants expressed a 60% higher willingness to pay for a bar of soap if it was presented as coming from a more grounding indie rather than from an industrial brand.

The authors further show that marketers can strategically use marketing mix elements to leverage the groundedness effect for their products. Want to find out how? Have a look at the link below.

Reference: Eichinger, Isabel, Martin Schreier, and Stijn M.J. van Osselaer (2021) “Connecting to Place, People, and Past: How Products Make Us Feel Grounded,” Journal of Marketing, (first published June 08), https://doi.org/10.1177/00222429211027469.