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Show Me Your Arm, I'll Guess What You Will Buy

, by Fabio Todesco
A series of experiments conducted by Zachary Estes and a University of Innsbruck's colleague show the amazing relations between body posture and purchasing behavior

Who controls your body posture controls your purchasing behavior. Literature posits that arm extension (elbow 180°) facilitates reaction to negative stimuli, while arm flexion (elbow 90°) facilitates responding to positive stimuli. Department of Marketing's Zachary Estes and University of Innsbruck's Mathias Streicher devised three experiments in order to check whether the two different postures in fact can affect consumer behavior.

In their first experiment, students were asked to push a modified shopping cart, with sensors attached to the handlebar, towards a products display and then to indicate their purchase intentions. The group asked to push the cart with flexed arms purchased significantly more products than the rest.

A second experiment replicated the same results in an online shopping scenario. This time students were asked to shop online with one palm pressed either upward on the underside of a table (flexion) or downward on the upside (extension). And again shoppers with a flexed arm hypothetically purchased more and spent more than shoppers with an extended arm.

Furthermore, the scholars wanted to understand whether arm extension always inhibits and flexion always facilitates purchasing behavior or if the effect depends on the interaction of arm posture and purchasing direction. In their third experiment, thus, participants were asked to indicate their purchase intentions by moving products into a hypothetical purchasing area, while maintaining a flexion or extension arm posture with the other arm. In one case the purchasing area was located beyond the products and participants had to purchase away from their bodies, in the other it was located between the products and the participants, that had to purchase towards their bodies. In the first case the posture effect was reversed: extension facilitated purchasing.

"The experiments have obvious relevance for retailers", Estes says, "in that they show that cart design and body posture can affect consumer behavior".

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