Dress to impress


Many people hold consultants in awe; they drive fancy cars, wear designer suits, and carry themselves with certain gravity. But does all this ’power dressing’ actually have a net effect on the influence of the advice they offer?

Indeed, a consultant’s anecdotic slick Armani suit and shiny BMW parked in front of the office contribute to increased advice utilization. This appears from research done by Stefanie Tzioti, PhD graduate at ERIM. In her dissertation, entitled Let Me Give You a Piece of Advice: Empirical Papers about Advice Taking in Marketing, she studies the effects of opinion and advice giving on decision making. The findings reported in this dissertation demonstrate once again, in the domain of advice taking, the important role that unconscious processes play in decision making.

More often than not, (marketing) managers seek advice from others when they need to make important decisions. Various industries, from advertising to consulting, build an entire business on the ability to make the advice they provide to their consumers valued and utilized. As advice giving and taking is omnipresent in all organisations, it is insightful for (marketing) practitioners to understand the factors that lead to an increase or decrease in advice taking. The findings reported in this dissertation suggest that expertise is not always the biggest motive for accepting advice. Instead, advice seems to be significantly more readily taken form a person dressed in a custom-made suit and driving an expensive car (even when he has no expertise at all). Moreover, from this dissertation it appears that justifying the advice, either intuitively or analytically, in a way that is appropriate to the (marketing) problem at hand and to the seniority of the advisor, promotes advice taking. Finally, different discrete positive and negative emotions were found to influence advice taking in unique ways. Hence, it appears that advisors such as consultants and policy makers may benefit from generating or inducing (or, in contrast, purposely avoiding generating or inducing) a specific emotion to exert a stronger influence on the final decision maker.

Stefanie Tzioti defended her dissertation on November 4, 2010.Her promoters were Prof.dr. Stijn van Osselaer, Professor of Consumer Marketing, and Prof.dr.ir. Berend Wierenga, Professor of Marketing. Other members of the Doctoral Committee were Prof.dr. D. Smeesters, Prof.dr. D. Van Knippenberg, and Prof.dr. M. Zeelenberg (Tilburg University).

About Stefanie Tzioti

Stefanie Tzioti (Schiedam, 1984) obtained her master‘s degree in International Business Administration cum laude from the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University in 2007. In the same year she joined the Erasmus Research Institute of Management as a PhD Candidate at the department of Marketing Management. Her main research interests are consumer and managerial decision making and behaviour. Currently, different parts of her work are under review at the Journal of Marketing Research and Organization Behaviour and Human Decision Processes.

Abstract of ‘Let Me Give You a Piece of Advice’

Using advice in decision making is widespread for all sorts of important (personal and professional) decisions. Yet, traditional research on individual decision making has failed to systematically study the impact that social interactions about a decision problem can have on the decision outcome. A separate literature stream about advice giving and taking emerged in the 1980s in order to model a decision making structure where one person is responsible for the final decision, but seeks advice from one or more other persons as input in the decision making process. To date, a breadth of research questions have been addressed in order to gradually develop a theory of advice taking. This dissertation is a bundle of three empirical papers on advice taking in marketing that each studies a specific topic within the advice taking domain. Using similar experimental methodologies, the papers bundled in this thesis all find and discuss variable utilization of advice based on the manipulation of one element in the advice situation: advisor wealth, advice justification, and emotions experienced by the decision maker. As such, each of the papers offers some interesting managerial implications and contributes to the development of a more comprehensive theory of advice taking in its own right.