Whimsical and neutral products. Photograph: Gary Wayne Gilbert

Behavioral scientists have long known that pictures of babies—with their puffy cheeks, big eyes, and ample foreheads—trigger a sympathetic response in adult consumers. The appeal of “baby cuteness,” a term used by associate professor of marketing Gergana Nenkov, explains in part why the Geico gecko and E-Trade baby are potent sales tools. But few have weighed the attraction of what Nenkov calls whimsical cuteness—the design strategy embedded in purses that look like watermelon slices, and kitchen appliances that seem to have facial features, and even the pint-size Mini Cooper car.

Nenkov and her co-researcher, Maura Scott, an assistant professor of marketing at Florida State University, describe their recent studies of cute products in the August 2014 Journal of Consumer Research. For one experiment they invited undergraduates to an ice cream taste test. Half were handed a plain scooper, half the whimsical human-shaped scooper (at left, above). Participants who served themselves with the cute utensil became significantly more engaged consumers, eating 28 percent more than those with the nondescript scooper.

In another experiment, the researchers presented 119 adults with one of three Amazon gift cards—a neutral card bearing the company logo, a version of the card featuring a photograph of a baby, or a whimsically cute polka-dotted card. Participants were told to spend an allotted $25 to rent five films from a list that Nenkov and Scott had curated. Half the films were “lowbrow” (The Avengers, Bridesmaids) and half “highbrow” (e.g., The King’s Speech and Anna Karenina). Fifty-eight percent of the movies obtained with the neutral cards and 57 percent of those obtained with the baby-cuteness version were lowbrow. But it was the adults with the polka-dotted cards who won the low ground, spending 70 percent of their funds on the likes of The Hangover II. The researchers posit that baby cuteness—kindchenschema in psychology parlance—similar to a neutral design, speaks to the adult in a consumer. More specifically it triggers “evolutionary reactions meant to ensure the survival of an infant”; whimsical cuteness, by contrast, “primes [a sense] of fun” and “a self-reward focus.”

The researchers found indications that kindchenschema may trump whimsical cuteness. In a test, half of a group of adults were shown a cookie decorated with a cartoonish lion face; when they were offered a meal, they prefered a heavy over a healthy one—more so than did adults who were shown the same cookie minus the face. But when the researchers used “kindchenschema positioning” and told a second set of participants that the cookies were baked at a store called The Kid’s Cookie Shop, both cookies—cute and neutral—inspired similar high interest in a healthy dish. “When you send a reminder that says, you know what, you’re an adult,” Nenkov says, “it makes the
consumer more responsible.”

—Zachary Jason

Read more by Zachary Jason