Age may just be a number, but how it’s described impacts customer perceptions, UBC study finds

A new study out of the University of British Columbia found whiskey, for example, is perceived as more valuable if it is perceived as older.

What sounds more appealing, a product from 2016 or one that’s 10 years old? That depends on what you’re selling, according to new research out of the University of British Columbia.

A study published in the Journal of Marketing Research sought to examine how the description of the passage of time influenced customer perception of value.

“When age is valued, consumers have more favourable perceptions when time is framed by length. On the other hand, when age reduces value…framing by year is preferable,” a news release from UBC said.

The study’s co-author, Dr. Deepak Sirwani, explained that something called the “year-length effect” can cause people to perceive something described as 10 years old as older than something described as being from 2016.

“Our mental number line is logarithmic, meaning the difference between numbers feels smaller as they increase,” he said in a news release about the study.

“The difference between 11 and 12 feels smaller than the difference between two and three. And the difference between 2020 and 2021 feels much smaller than the difference between one and two.”

The study looked at whiskey as an example of a product that increases in value with age and found when age was described as a number of years, bottles fetched nine per cent more than when a particular year was referenced.

Conversely, the researchers found used items listed on Craigslist tended to fetch lower values when the passage of time was described as a number of years. In cases where only the purchase year was cited, the products sold for roughly 17 per cent more.

“There is no one framing that is better than the other,” Sirwani said, in the release.

“It boils down to whether you would benefit from time feeling near or far.”