Thanksgiving is, somehow, next week. Which means it’s also Black Friday next week. And whether the thought of that consumer free-for-all fills you with glee or dread, it’s likely evoking some sort of strong emotion.

And those emotions—or any others you may be feeling while you’re shopping—can affect your purchasing decisions, sometimes in unexpected ways. Today we’ll dive into some research on the impact of different emotions on consumer behavior.

The Impact of Anger

Does elbowing your way through Black Friday crowds elicit rage? While this is undoubtedly bad for your blood pressure, (and probably unpleasant for those on the receiving end of your elbows), it may actually make you a more focused shopper.

Contrary to the prevailing wisdom that it’s best to feel calm, cool, and collected before making important decisions, Michal Maimaran, a research professor of marketing, and her colleagues find that angry consumers make more goal-oriented choices, are less likely to delay their purchase, are less likely to compromise, and are ultimately more satisfied with their choices than those who are feeling sad, fearful, or even neutral.

No, this doesn’t mean we should always shop angry. But it does suggest that our anger has the potential to help us focus on what is most important to us.

“We usually think of anger as negative, in the sense that it has a bad effect on us and therefore would inhibit goal pursuit,” Maimaran says. “But anger can actually be beneficial for us. It’s surprisingly counterintuitive.”

Fear and Disgust Elicit a Need for Control

Does being in a crowded store during flu/COVID/RSV season freak you out? If so, your shopping may be impacted by feelings of fear and disgust, which research shows can steer us toward familiar items.

Across several studies, marketing professor Gregory Carpenter and his coauthors found that thinking about contagious diseases—as opposed to unrelated things or even noncontagious diseases—leads people to prefer familiar brands and products over novel ones. In fact, the amount of influenza in each state can even predict purchases of certain familiar comfort foods—like Campbell’s canned soups and Oreo cookies—over time. A 10 percent increase in flu was linked to a 1.6 percent increase in sales for Campbell’s, but only a 0.1 percent increase for other, less-familiar brands.

The researchers believe that infectious diseases conjure feelings of fear and disgust, which in turn influence our shopping preferences. The fear pushes us to take action in order to reestablish some semblance of control, while the disgust makes us want to withdraw and pulls us away from more novel brands and products.

“We don’t think of buying a traditional Oreo as a way to bring control into our life, but that’s apparently how people are behaving,” Carpenter says.

Pay Attention to the Emotions in Online Reviews

Maybe you’re more of a Cyber Monday-style shopper. If so, do you scour online reviews before you make a purchase? Then perhaps you’ve encountered the “positivity problem,” where lots of products have positive reviews, and you cannot discriminate between them.

Marketing professor Derek Rucker and Loran Nordgren, a professor of management and organizations, offer an intriguing way to sift through which reviews truly are raves and which are more tempered endorsements.

Through computational analysis of hundreds of thousands of online reviews, the researchers discovered that positive star and numerical ratings don’t always reliably correlate with how well products and businesses ultimately fared. But something else did: the emotionality of the reviews.

Emotionality is the extent to which a reaction is rooted in emotion. “‘Awesome’ is a very positive word that also conveys a lot emotion with it,” Rucker explains. “‘Perfect’ is also a very positive word, but it doesn’t have a lot of emotionality.”

Movies, books, and restaurants with reviews that scored high in emotionality were ultimately more successful in terms of sales (or in the case of restaurants, daily reservations) than those with less-emotional reviews.

“The promise of these online platforms is that now we can see and learn from others, and that should have extraordinary value,” Nordgren says. But the overwhelming number of positive reviews has dampened their usefulness, resulting in a missed opportunity. Looking at emotionality is one important way to capitalize “on that unrealized promise.”

LEADERSHIP QUOTE

“The pandemic led to labor shortages in many parts of the economy. That provides workers with more leverage, more options, and people are willing to switch to achieve improvements. I think economists were expecting this to somehow fade out at this point, but it really hasn’t.”

—Associate professor Benjamin Friedrich in the Chicago Tribune, on why employee loyalty is declining.