When you splurge on designer shoes for your spouse this holiday season, you should double-check that they go with the rest of her wardrobe. Because if they don’t, says a new study, she likely won’t send you back to the store to return them. Instead, she’ll just buy new clothes to make it all match, further draining that checking account already hit hard by the holidays.
That costly behavior is explored in a new study to be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Marketing Research, which calls the consumer psychology phenomenon “aesthetic incongruity resolution,” an academic way of saying “what do you do when the couch doesn’t match the curtains?” Vanessa Patrick, a marketing professor at the C.T. Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston, and Henrik Hagtvedt, a marketing professor at Boston College’s Carroll School of Management, find that when consumers buy a product high in “design salience” — in other words, stuff that looks nice — and subsequently find that the product doesn’t fit in with an existing wardrobe or home dcor, they’re more likely buy more products to accommodate their new purchase. “There’s a domino effect that can be quite dangerous,” says Hagtvedt.
For a third experiment, subjects were shown pictures of one of two types of armchairs, and the living room in which that chair that would be placed. Both the trendier, trimmer chair and the lumpier model shown to the subjects were not aesthetic fits in the living room. They were then asked to imagine a situation in which they had purchased that chair for the living room, and to report their feelings of regret and frustration about the purchase, and whether they’d buy more matching items or return the chair. Subjects shown the designer armchair reported higher levels of frustration about the aesthetic mismatch, and said they’d be more likely to buy more stuff to make the living room work. On the other hand, participants shown the non-designer chair were more likely to say they’d regret that purchase, and return it.
So if you’re shopping for designer items, keep this new version of buyer beware in mind. “Beware of the never-ending spiral,” says Hagtvedt. “You’ll start with an innocent purchase, and the next thing you know, you’re buying a new living room.” Download TIME’s iPhone, BlackBerry and Android applications.
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