When people are most likely to switch brands

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📝 Context

Topic: Brand & Strategy | Customer Experience
For: B2C. Can be tested for B2B
Research date: August 2025
Universities: Northeastern University, University of Pennsylvania, Arizona State University

You're the e-commerce manager of a supplement brand. You've noticed a strange pattern in your customer data: people purchase 3 or 4 times, try different supplements, then leave and never come back.

You'd expect people to churn after the first purchase, not after they’ve purchased multiple times. Turns out, unless they’re already experts, the more experience people gain with a product category, the less confident they feel about their choice, and the more likely they are to switch brands. 

Knowing where your customers are in that journey lets you intervene at the right moment, in the right way, lowering the chances of churn.

P.S.: You can encourage repeat purchases and reduce churn by turning your loyalty rewards into a gamble. For example, let customers know they’ll receive either a discount or a free gift on future purchases.

📈 Recommendation

Monitor your customers’ level of experience with your kind of product (e.g. check purchase history in ecom, ask about previous experience during sales calls). 

Customers with a medium level of experience (tried a few products but are not experts) are at the highest risk of churn. To reduce that:

• Encourage them to reflect on the quality of the product and experience. For example, send feedback surveys, call them, or remind them of the key product benefits.

• If you offer multiple products, avoid recommending the same product to what they've already tried. Instead, recommend new and different products (e.g. a different style, or brand) to address people’s interest in trying new products at this stage.

People will feel more confident in their choices and will be less likely to switch.

🎓 Findings

• People decide to switch brands depending on their level of confidence (familiarity) with the product category (e.g. how many products they’ve tried or got to know about). Confidence follows an inverted U shape: 

  • Initially, when people have very little knowledge of a product category (e.g. have tried only one brand), they are more confident and less likely to switch

  • As they gain experience (e.g. tried variations of the same product), they start losing confidence and become more likely to change brands

  • Confidence returns once they become experts, and their brand choice becomes firmer

• As part of an analysis of 3.7 million product reviews spanning nearly 30 years and an online experiment, researchers found that people:

  • Expressed less confidence in evaluating a new wine, and switched types (e.g. from Chardonnay to Bordeaux) when they got to know more than 10 but less than 240 wines

  • Showed higher confidence when they had very little experience in the product category (e.g. less than 8 beers tested) but as they tried more and lost confidence, they moved to a different brand next

  • Were 4.5% more likely to switch makeup brands when they had reviewed between 2 and 10 products. 54% of those who switched never returned.

  • Switched music genres 23.5% more often when they felt unconfident with their initial choice.

• The effect is weaker when people are encouraged to think thoroughly about their experience, which helps them gain confidence sooner and switch less.

🧠 Why it works

• When we are completely inexperienced in a product category, we are overconfident because we are unaware of what we don’t know.

• As we gain more experience and try new brands, we start noticing our knowledge gaps, which makes us lose confidence.

• This makes us feel uncertain and can make us decide to change brands to avoid this feeling.

• But as we try more products and gain knowledge and experience, we get more confident and start choosing with certainty, which makes us confident in our choice.

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✋ Limitations

• Only frequently changed products were looked at (e.g. makeup, beers), it’s unclear how the effect applies to products that are purchased rarely or are expensive to change (e.g. mattress, washing machine)

• Gathering knowledge about new products from different sources other than personal experience (e.g. word of mouth) might increase confidence and lower the effect, but it was not tested.

• High experience might make people more aware of product flaws and more critical, which could impact their switching behavior, but this research did look into this.

👀 Real-life example

Alice Mushrooms created an innovative kind of supplement by infusing the health benefits of mushrooms into chocolate bars. They compete with traditional and established pill-supplement brands.

❌ Issue: In the supplement category, people have probably tried standard products (e.g. pills), but are likely unfamiliar with innovative supplements. Their overall level of confidence with the category is likely intermediate. This makes them more likely to try them, but switch also afterwards.

✅ Solution: As an innovative product in the health supplement category, Alice Mushrooms could try to take advantage of unconfident consumers switching from other supplement brands. They can do so by:

• Including an on-site quiz to welcome people and ask about how much they know about chocolate or mushroom-based health products, and personalise the experience accordingly. For example, suggest a product similar to what they’ve tried if the customer is experienced, or position themselves as different if they’ve never tried anything similar.

• Send new customers a short survey a few weeks post-purchase to ask about what they’ve liked about the product to boost future spending and loyalty. This helps prevent them from switching brands.

• Rather than simply giving discounts on large amounts, introduce a simple loyalty program (e.g. Spend $100, get 1 bar free) to make customers less likely to leave after they’ve tried the product.

🔍 Study type

Online experiment and market observation (analysis of 3,712,528 million reviews from 94,377 consumers spanning nearly 30 years).

📖 Research

The Trajectory of Confidence: Experience, Certainty, and Consumer Choice. Journal of Marketing Research (August 2025). 

🏫 Researchers

• Matthew D. Rocklage. Northwestern University

• Jonah Berger. Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

• Reihane Boghrati. W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University

Remember: This is a new scientific discovery. In the future it will probably be better understood and could even be proven wrong (that’s how science works). It may also not be generalizable to your situation. If it’s a risky change, always test it on a small scale before rolling it out widely.

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