DJS Research Ltd

In another life my wife would have made a fantastic member of the paparazzi. Not because she loves hiding in bushes, but because she has a knack for taking unflattering snaps of me whilst I’m lost in my own world.

Take this less than insta-ready picture she snapped one past weekend, I assume, to commemorate all the fun I'm told we were having. It was only when she rushed over to show me her handywork that something occurred to me – see if you can spot it.

No, no, not the unbridled joy plastered across my face. It was the height of the tables – I mean look at them!

I couldn’t help but wonder whether this store was missing something by having tables of the shin-height variety.

With time on my side, I pulled out my phone and started to investigate…

The mere ownership effect describes how people tend to value what they own more than what they do not own. However, research also shows how the mere act of picking up a product can increase our sense of perceived ownership and subsequently the valuation we place on that object.

Notably, researchers out of the US measured participants’ perceived ownership of certain objects (e.g., a slinky and a mug, of all things) via a three-item set of 7-point scales, having checked beforehand that no one owned either object prior to the experiment[1].

The outcome: intriguingly, relative to a no touch condition, object touch led to greater perceived ownership of the objects, which in turn led to higher valuations of the objects too!

Down the rabbit hole…

Whilst *blissfully* waiting for my wife to finish up so that we could *happily* move on to store number six, I began to delve into the fascinating world of haptic research; that is, the study of human touch sensing.

Application after application came to the fore in ways that people rarely stop to appreciate during the course of their busy lives. When I got home, I jumped back into Charles Spence’s Sensehacking, which pointed out a number of examples of just how much more important touch is than we often realise:

The sheer amount of information conveyed through touch, from texture, hardness, temperature, and weight is so vast when you stop and think about it. And yet my own escapades suggest that not all stores appear to incorporate this into their layouts. Or, alternatively, could it be that the store in question has found that people are more inclined to bend and touch when they encounter smaller tables? All I know is that the store's workers weren't able to shed any light on this conundrum...and that you're looked at as a madman for asking about it.

Given that people often like to take the easiest route when completing a given action, such tweaks to stores may be something worth considering as it could promote people's propensity to run their hands over items as they walk by...and boost their levels of perceived ownership and value in the process.