Marketing Benchmarks: Do You Trust Your Friendly Marketer?

With many products, consumers must make key decisions—the amount to use per application, the need to replace when worn out, or a reasonable amount to spend—and there are no clear answers to these questions. Consumers are unlikely to have the expertise or the motivation to find optimal answers. The term marketing benchmark is used for a marketer‐supplied indication of how much of a product to use, how often to replace it, or how much to spend on it. Even though consumers have reasons to be skeptical, a series of experiments indicate that advertised marketing benchmarks influence how much they believe they should use per application and how frequently they should replace products. Furthermore, skepticism toward advertising appears to provide only small protection against the influence of marketing benchmarks.