Repository files navigation

• Pony Ameri
• Hannah Gross
• Suna S. Legolu
• Autumn Rains

Do positive marketing messages influence a consumer’s preference of a product? Many experiments havebeen conducted on how expectations influence perception. These experiments have shown that people’s levelof enjoyment is impacted by the cues that they are given before consumption. To examine this theory, weconducted The Olive Oil Taste Test, a two-factor deception design field experiment. Participants were askedto taste two samples of the same olive oil in a randomized order under the guise the oils were different.Participants in treatment were given a marketing message regarding one of the olive oil samples, indicatingit was superior in quality. Participants in control were given an alternative factual message. We performedanalysis using linear regression in R Studio. The results of our experiment show that participants do not tendto favor an olive oil with a marketing message. This outcome leads us to conclude that marketing messagesdo not have an effect on a consumer’s enjoyment of a product. However, there are reasons to remain skepticalabout these results. The most important reason being a low powered experiment, given the small sample sizeand lukewarm marketing message. Despite our results, we believe that it may be worthwhile to reproducethis experiment with a large sample and a potent marketing message to produce more robust results.

UC BERKELEY MIDS: W241 - Experiments and Causal Inference