New research led by a professor at the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC) is challenging the commonly held view that businesses ought to provide as much favorable information about their product as possible once they have a customer’s attention.

“The usual notion is that you need to ‘put your best foot forward’ by putting all your positive information out front,” says the study’s principal investigator, UNBC marketing professor Xin Ge, whose work will be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Consumer Research. “Our study suggests that businesses that hold a little information back until a later stage of the purchasing process hold a competitive advantage. But marketers need to walk a fine line to disclose information at just the right time.”
 
Consumers often use a two-stage process to make purchase decisions. First, they assess the various alternatives available in the marketplace and screen out those that are not attractive to them. Then they evaluate a small set of products more thoroughly to make their final choice. However, Dr. Ge says the positive effect of delay is limited to a “sweet spot” between revealing too much information too soon and delaying some information for so long it will result in an irrecoverable disadvantage at the screening stage.

“In the study, our test subjects chose between four hotels,” says Dr. Ge, who collaborated with two researchers from the University of Alberta. “Once the participants had eliminated two options from consideration, we found that the hotel that had ‘saved’ a favorable aspect of their business—such as a five-star cleanliness rating—held a competitive advantage over hotels which had put all of their favourable information out front.”
 
The research indicates that delayed presentation of favorable information causes a shift in the relative importance that consumers attach to different attributes (like price, cleanliness, and size for hotel rooms). The study also suggests that a delayed release of information causes a preference boost for the product as consumers compare it to a competitor, for which no additional information becomes available in the final stage.
 
Dr. Ge says the findings have implications not only for the sellers of consumer products, but also for other “persuaders” seeking to influence the actions of target individuals or organizations. “Political candidates might be able to more effectively influence voting behavior by deferring the announcement of some campaign promises until just prior to election dates. Similarly, job applicants might increase their chance of being offered a position by withholding some favorable information about themselves from a prospective employer until after the initial screening of candidates.”
 
The study will be published in the April 2012 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research.