Leveraging Underdog Positioning and Consumer Trait Agreeableness for Sustained Marketing Strategy

Independent and small businesses often rely on underdog positioning strategies to gain market share against larger and more established companies. However, the effectiveness of these strategies remains unclear. The current study aims to investigate how different consumer personalities may influence their responses towards underdog positioning strategies. Two experimental studies with U.K. consumers (n = 349) show that the relationship between underdog status and positive attitudes is not as straightforward as previously believed. The research uses the lens of self-efficacy theory and found that underdog status positively correlates with perceived effort, consumer preference, and willingness to commit only among consumers with high trait agreeableness. In other words, although consumers generally acknowledge the efforts exerted by underdog providers, our study found that only agreeable consumers are more likely to reciprocate these efforts with increased positive attitudes. These findings contribute to the growing literature that examines the efficacy of the underdog effect. Subsequently, the findings have strong implications in ensuring the sustainability of small businesses by ensuring that marketing spending is optimized to target only the most effective consumer segments.

When the Relatively Poor Prosper: The Underdog Effect on Charitable Donations

In fundraising, it is common for the donor to see how much a charity has received so far. What is the impact of this information on (a) how much people choose to donate and (b) which charity they choose to donate to? Conditional cooperation suggests that people will donate to the charity that has received the most prior support, while the Underdog Effect suggests increased donations to the charity with the least support. Across two laboratory experiments, an online study (combined N = 494) and a qualitative survey ( N = 60), a consistent preference to donate to the charity with the least prior support was observed. Thus, the Underdog Effect was supported. We suggest people will show a preference for the underdog if there are two or more charities to donate to, one of the charities is at a disadvantage, and people have little preexisting loyalty to either charity.

How are Voters Influenced by Opinion Polls? The Effect of Polls on Voting Behavior and Party Sympathy

Similar to all other types of information, public opinion polls can influence public opinion. We present two hypotheses to understand how polls affect public opinion: the bandwagon and the underdog effect. The bandwagon effect claims that voters “jump on the bandwagon,” which means that if a party is gaining in the polls, the party will gain additional support from the voters, and vice versa if the party is losing in the polls. The underdog effect suggests that if a party is losing in the polls, the party will gain some sympathy votes to offset this loss. We use a survey experiment to test the two hypotheses. We find evidence of the bandwagon effect, and the effect is strongest in the positive direction. When voters learn that a party is gaining in the polls, voters will be more likely to vote for it. There is also some evidence for the negative bandwagon effect. We find no evidence for the underdog effect. The effects head in the same direction regardless of the size of the party. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings with regards to a potential ban on publishing opinion polls.

Bandwagon Effect

The term “bandwagon effect” denotes a phenomenon of public opinion impinging upon itself. Conceptually, it is somewhat ambiguous, so that definitions in the literature vary. Often, it is defined as a tendency of people to affiliate with the winning side of a competition. More generally, it can be defined as an inclination of persons to join in their preferences or behaviors what they perceive to be existing or emerging majorities or dominant positions in society. This implies that success breeds further success, and alternatives that appear to enjoy a broad popular backing are likely to gain even stronger support. Sometimes, it is correspondingly claimed that minorities or losing alternatives, because of their weakness, suffer further losses of support. In any case, the notion of bandwagon effects implies the idea that perceived public opinion exhibits the quality of a self-fulfilling prophecy. For public opinion perceptions, information conveyed by the mass media is crucial. Reporting on public opinion polls is the most important, but not the only, source of such impressions. The notion of the bandwagon effect started its scientific life as a rather vague idea without a well-developed theoretical basis. Accordingly, it lacked conceptual precision and proved empirically elusive. But a number of carefully designed studies have succeeded in demonstrating that bandwagon effects do exist. The theoretical background of bandwagon effects has only recently come to be better understood. Whether they emerge and how large they are is strongly contingent on personal and situational circumstances as well as attributes of the triggering messages. Bandwagon effects have been most intensely explored in politics. Some studies have also investigated their functioning in other areas of life, such as consumer behavior. The bandwagon effect is one of several hypothesized manifestations of “impersonal influence”—effects on individuals’ attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors that derive from these persons’ impressions about the attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors of collectives of anonymous others outside their personal contact sphere. Other examples of impersonal influence are the “underdog effect,” which complements the bandwagon effect by stating a positive impact of perceptions of failure or losing, and—with specific reference to elections—the notion of “strategic” voting, which expects voters to support a less attractive alternative at an election if they can thereby avoid “wasting” their vote.