How to Harness Envy to Boost Customer Engagement

Growing up in Hyderabad, India, Praveen Kopalle, the Signal Companies’ Professor of Management at Tuck, recalls conducting a “Vahan” (vehicle) “pooja” (ritual) when his dad had bought him a brand-new motorcycle. They applied red and yellow dots made of turmeric to the bike and then Kopalle put one lemon under each wheel and drove over them.  

While the belief in the evil eye may sound irrational or superstitious, it is nonetheless a powerful emotion connected to the purchase of expensive products. And where there’s emotion around consumption, there’s a chance for retailers to connect with their customers on a deeper level. Specifically, firms can use marketing to acknowledge their customers’ fear of the evil eye and then help allay that fear by offering products for their post-purchase rituals.

Kopalle studies this dynamic in a new working paper titled “Leveraging Post-Purchase Consumer Emotions and Extraordinary Rituals for Marketplace Success.” In the paper, Kopalle and his coauthors performed a pilot experiment in Hyderabad, India, to tease out the underlying psychological process of the evil eye belief. They followed that with a field study on Facebook and a lab experiment to learn more about consumer engagement and behavior.

For their pilot study, the authors conducted surveys and in-depth interviews with 36 adults studying or working in Hyderabad. They asked participants to imagine in detail what they would do after buying a new car, and what thoughts, concerns and emotions would drive that behavior. Through these questions, the authors were able to establish that the evil eye belief activated concerns about the envy of others, which in turn impacted their practice of extraordinary rituals. This study was the first in the literature to demonstrate this link between the evil eye belief and concern about envy.

The authors’ field study on Facebook was designed to build on this knowledge, and test “whether marketing communications in a real-world context that integrate the post-purchase emotion of envy, along with extraordinary rituals, are more effective than advertisements that do not,” they write. They did this through A/B testing advertisements in India with varying levels of evil eye related messaging, and measuring engagement through clicks, likes, comments and shares. The authors found that not only does advertising with an evil eye remedy boost consumer engagement, but also that marketers can use this relationship to design more effective communications, thus fostering a stronger connection with their customers. The study “also provides real-world behavioral evidence that activating concerns about the envy of others makes consumers gravitate toward extraordinary rituals in the marketplace.”

Finally, in the laboratory experiment, the authors wanted to explore if the level of consumer engagement could vary according to the status level of goods. For example, would consumers exhibit higher engagement in post-purchase rituals with a new car versus a used car? Through an online study with 250 participants, the authors found that less conspicuous goods did indeed induce lower engagement in extraordinary rituals.

This research has some important implications for marketers and retailers. First, the authors assert that “activating concerns about envy and offering post-purchase evil-eye related remedies can be effectively used to boost sales of different status-signaling products and experiences.” In other words, retailers can help their customers feel better about their conspicuous consumption and sell more products in the process. Second, firms can market lower-level products by highlighting that such goods are less likely to cause envy. Both implications remind firms of a broader truth: that when retailers truly understand every aspect of the customer experience, from practical considerations to philosophical and emotional ones, they stand to forge stronger relationships with shoppers and boost their profits.