A LookBerry research feature on envy, popularity, and consumer choice
A brand pays a celebrity to promote its clothes. But what if that celebrity makes people want to buy a similar item from another brand instead?
At LookBerry, we are exploring a hypothesis that challenges the usual logic of advertising: a person’s popularity may attract attention to a product while also discouraging people from buying it.
The reason may lie in the kind of envy the person in the campaign inspires.
One emotion. Two directions for a purchase
“I want what she has” and “I want nothing to do with her” can be reactions to the very same photograph.
In the first case, someone else’s success becomes a point of reference. In the second, it creates rejection. What matters is whether the viewer feels that the person’s success is deserved.
This connection was explored by the authors of The Envy Premium in Product Evaluation, published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2011. The study linked benign envy to a greater willingness to pay for a product owned by the person being compared with. With malicious envy, participants showed a greater willingness to pay for an attractive alternative that the other person did not have. (academic.oup.com)
This was not a LookBerry study, and it does not prove that a celebrity ambassador disliked by an audience will necessarily hurt sales. But its findings raise an important question for fashion: who actually benefits from an ad that makes people feel envy?
Views are there. What do they mean?
Our hypothesis is that when choosing a campaign face, brands need to look beyond the amount of attention and consider what drives it.
People may follow someone out of admiration. Curiosity. Because of a scandal. Or simply to wait for their next failure.
Each of these viewers adds to the view count. But it would be a mistake to assume they will all respond to an ad in the same way.
What’s more, someone may like the clothes and dislike the person promoting them. In that case, interest in the product and attitudes toward the brand advertising it may go in different directions.
The brand paid to create desire. Who gets the money is still an open question.
What LookBerry proposes to test
Fashion Battles offers a way to explore the connection between support for a participant, interest in their look, and purchases.
The main question is: do the winners of audience voting also generate the most purchases?
To test this, we need to compare several metrics:
- Votes for each participant.
- Clicks on the items they wear.
- Additions to cart.
- Completed purchases.
We also need to account for price, size availability, brand recognition, and the participant’s existing popularity. Otherwise, differences in sales could easily be wrongly attributed to their influence.
A separate hypothesis concerns how the participant is presented. Does the audience respond differently when viewers see more than a finished photograph - when they also see the styling process, the choice of items, and the reasoning behind those decisions?
This approach could help test whether a clear story behind a look turns attention into buying interest.
What likes cannot tell us
Even if one participant gets more votes and another generates more purchases, that alone does not prove envy is the reason. Testing the emotional response will require additional surveys and controlled comparisons.
But even this kind of difference would challenge a convenient assumption in advertising: that popularity and commercial effectiveness are the same thing.
LookBerry's working conclusion
We treat popularity as a measure of attention whose commercial value still needs to be tested.
For a brand, the important question is not only who people vote for. It is also whose choices help shoppers make their own.
For now, this is a LookBerry research hypothesis, not the result of an experiment we have conducted.
But the question for the advertising budget is already very concrete:
Are you paying for someone people look at - or for influence that leads to a purchase?
