The digital era and the ubiquity of social media have intensified the impact of misleading advertising. For example, some brands might take advantage of unsubstantiated claims trending online about product components, and offer ingredient-free alternatives that purport to be healthier than the current offerings in the market, sometimes at a higher price.
Tong Guo, a professor of marketing at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business studied the impact of advertisers adapting to false messages about products by offering alternative options, versus trying to correct information not validated by science.
In a paper, “Debunking Misinformation About Consumer Products: Effects on Beliefs and Purchase Behavior” published in the Journal of Marketing Research, Guo and colleagues examine the effectiveness of trying to correct misleading information and the motivations behind why companies often don’t engage in trying to set the record straight.
The Effectiveness of Correcting Inaccurate Information
The researchers ran experiments to measure the effects of debunking messages.
They picked three categories of consumer-packaged goods impacted by advertising campaigns raising safety questions about one of their key ingredients: fluoride in toothpastes, aluminum in deodorants, and genetically-modified ingredients in nutrition shakes.
Guo says the group wanted to test whether a counter-message could change minds and the resulting purchases, or whether the psychological theory of confirmation bias—in which people refuse any piece of information that is different from their prior beliefs—would be too difficult to overcome.
“We start with a short corrective message embedded in a social media post and measure whether it would work,” Guo said. “If confirmation bias persists, we shouldn’t expect any correcting message to work.”
The researchers conducted two waves of online experiments with more than 20,000 participants from