Some Numbers Are More Equal Than Others: How and Why Orderly Numbers Appeal to Consumers

• Main Authors: Shoham, Meyrav, Amit, Elinor, Steinhart, Yael, Priva, Uriel Cohen
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Consumer behavior; Consumers; Preferences
• ISSN: 0098-9258

Imagine standing in your local wine shop and trying to choose a bottle for a special dinner. There are two bottles available of a special edition from your favorite winery, one with the serial number 6262 and the other with the number 6281 on the label. Which bottle would you prefer, and why? In this paper, we propose and demonstrate that numbers such as 6262 are more appealing to consumers, and that they will be more likely to choose such products and to be satisfied should they obtain them. Consumers can encounter numerical information at various stages of their decision journeys. Numerical information such as prices, attribute values, rankings and ratings, version numbers, and loyalty points can all convey information about products to consumers (Santana, Thomas and Morwitz 2020). However, this research has focused on numbers as a signal about specific product attributes (e.g., Pena-Marin and Bhargave 2016; Shoham, Moldovan and Steinhart 2018) or quality (e.g., Gunasti and Ross 2010). Our paper diverges from the substantial literature on numbers that convey concrete information to explore how product numbers can be appealing in their own right. Consumers favor certain numbers over others (Jiang, Cho and Adawal 2009; Smith, Newman and Dhar 2016), often because the number signifies something to the consumer: feelings of luck, a personal meaning, or a sense of connection to someone else. We offer a novel perspective on why consumers may prefer products with certain numbers, focusing on whether the number is orderly or noisy. Taking an information theoretic approach, orderly numbers can be encoded using a smaller-than-expected representation (Shannon 1948; Swait and Adamowicz 2001). A number with repetition, such as 6262, is orderly because it can be represented as the number 62, repeated, rather than having to be conveyed using four separate digits. Research on other types of repetition indicates that it can have positive implications for consumer evaluations (Pogačar, Shrum and Lowrey 2018). We propose that the repetition of digits will also appeal to consumers, and that this happens because numbers with repetition satisfy the need for structure. Consumers in general seek structure in consumption (Cutright 2012). A sense of structure can counterbalance beliefs that consumers prefer to avoid, such as the belief that outcomes in their lives are randomly determined, or that the world is governed by nothing more than chaos (Antonovsky 1979; Kruglanski 1989).