Imagine you are searching for a new mattress online and find something surprising. The retailer displays an ad featuring a “Mattress Comfort Scale” running from 1 (soft) to 10 (firm), followed by the message that if your firmness preference is at either end, this mattress is not for you. Wait … what? A retailer telling someone not to buy its product? No way!

Why would a company tell potential buyers that the product might not suit them? Our team of professors – Karen Anne Wallach, Jaclyn L. Tanenbaum and Sean Blair – examines this question in a recently published article in the Journal of Consumer Research.

Marketers spend billions trying to persuade consumers that a product is right for them. But our research shows that sometimes the most effective way to market something is to say that it isn’t for them. In other words, effective marketing can mean discouraging the wrong customers rather than convincing everyone to buy.

We call this “dissuasive framing.” Instead of saying a........

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