Targeting Couples: Are Dyad Exposures Greater Than One Plus One? Shared Information and Couple Interaction Matter in Household Purchase Decisions

Household is an important consumption unit that involves joint decision-making. While numerous studies have investigated the impact of advertising on purchases at the individual level, the interactions among individuals within a household have been largely overlooked. This article investigates a novel dyad-exposure advertising method that targets both spouses as decision-makers in purchasing household products. With data from a field experiment that promotes a smart toilet brand, the authors investigate the impact of the dyad-exposure method and compare it with that of exposing ads to two individuals from different couples (i.e., single-exposure). Empirical analysis shows that the dyad-exposure method achieves more than twice the conversion rate in household product advertising. The mechanism exploration suggests that the dyad-exposure method stimulates intra-couple interaction, hence producing a superior conversion rate. The results also demonstrate the heterogeneous effects of the dyad-exposure method on households with various demographic and behavioral attributes.