Jillian Hmurovic, a doctoral candidate in marketing at the University of Pittsburgh’s Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business, and her colleagues Lauren Grewal of Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College and Cait Lamberton, also of Katz, and Rebecca Walker Reczek of Fisher College of Business at Ohio State University found that people devalue ugly produce because it adversely influences how they view themselves.
In a series of five experiments, published in the Journal of Marketing, Hmurovic and her co-authors identified retail interventions that can buffer against these negative self-inferences and drive sales of unattractive produce.
Read about their research and findings in the University of Pittsburgh’s PittWire article.