According to new research, when people are choosing a place for a big event, they want to feel unique
2 min
When planning a trip, or seeking a venue for a special celebration, prospective travellers often look at social-media photos of people enjoying possible destinations.
Such selfies can actually make the destinations seem less appealing, according to a recently published study . More specifically, if consumers are considering a place for a self-defining experience such as a wedding, proposal or special vacation, they won’t like it if they see other people pictured there.
The reason, researchers say, is that when a human is featured in a website picture or social-media post of a destination, it can give the viewer a sense that the person pictured has or is signalling ownership of the place.
“We want to stand out by being a little different,” says Zoe Y. Lu , an assistant professor of marketing at Tulane University and the lead author of the paper. “If my cousin saw a picture of my husband proposing to me at a particular national park, for example, my cousin would worry that choosing that same spot to propose to his loved one would be perceived as him being a boring person, lacking a sense of self.”
Across six studies, Lu and two colleagues looked at when and why human presence in online photos lowers viewers’ preference for what she calls “experience venues”—that is, destinations that serve not only as physical spaces but as symbolic arenas that provide a way for people to define themselves.
In one experiment, Lu and her team asked 416 online participants to look at images of two hiking trails, labeled A and B, and to imagine they were picking one for their New Year’s Day hike. Participants liked trail A better than trail B when no person was shown. If there was a hiker present in the photo of trail A but not trail B, viewers preferred trail A significantly less than when no human was shown. “Our theory is that the hiker in the image offers kind of a territorial signal,” says Lu. “It says to our self-identity, ‘Someone else has been here, don’t try their hike, try a hike that seems like nobody has done.’ ”
In another experiment, participants were asked to imagine the photos they were being shown were of two potential wedding locations for themselves. Fifty-three percent of participants chose location A if neither picture included another couple tying the knot. But if another couple was shown in a photo of location A, and not in location B, only 27% of the participants chose location A.
By contrast, in another experiment, participants were told to imagine they were planning a wedding for someone else. As planners, they didn’t mind whether or not a couple was shown in the photo. “Wedding planners aren’t seeking self-identity the way their clients are,” Lu says.
Lu says that her research may have some implications for online marketers. “They might encourage previous customers not to post selfies of special experiences if they want new customers to try those experiences at the same location, which seems counterintuitive, I know,” she says.
Hotels and destinations, too, might reconsider including images of clearly visible guests and visitors in their marketing materials. And social-media influencers might want to skip the selfie in paid posts for destinations, so as not to seem territorial. One exception, Lu notes, is when the person in the photo has an identity that is distinct from that of the viewer, such as the owner of the venue, “but you might want to acknowledge that the person shown is the owner,” she says.
Copyright 2020, Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. LEARN MORE
What a quarter-million dollars gets you in the western capital.
Alexandre de Betak and his wife are focusing on their most personal project yet.
Report by the San Francisco Fed shows small increase in premiums for properties further away from the sites of recent fires
3 min
Wildfires in California have grown more frequent and more catastrophic in recent years, and that’s beginning to reflect in home values, according to a report by the San Francisco Fed released Monday.
The effect on home values has grown over time, and does not appear to be offset by access to insurance. However, “being farther from past fires is associated with a boost in home value of about 2% for homes of average value,” the report said.
In the decade between 2010 and 2020, wildfires lashed 715,000 acres per year on average in California, 81% more than the 1990s. At the same time, the fires destroyed more than 10 times as many structures, with over 4,000 per year damaged by fire in the 2010s, compared with 355 in the 1990s, according to data from the United States Department of Agriculture cited by the report.
That was due in part to a number of particularly large and destructive fires in 2017 and 2018, such as the Camp and Tubbs fires, as well the number of homes built in areas vulnerable to wildfires, per the USDA account.
The Camp fire in 2018 was the most damaging in California by a wide margin, destroying over 18,000 structures, though it wasn’t even in the top 20 of the state’s largest fires by acreage. The Mendocino Complex fire earlier that same year was the largest ever at the time, in terms of area, but has since been eclipsed by even larger fires in 2020 and 2021.
As the threat of wildfires becomes more prevalent, the downward effect on home values has increased. The study compared how wildfires impacted home values before and after 2017, and found that in the latter period studied—from 2018 and 2021—homes farther from a recent wildfire earned a premium of roughly $15,000 to $20,000 over similar homes, about $10,000 more than prior to 2017.
The effect was especially pronounced in the mountainous areas around Los Angeles and the Sierra Nevada mountains, since they were closer to where wildfires burned, per the report.
The study also checked whether insurance was enough to offset the hit to values, but found its effect negligible. That was true for both public and private insurance options, even though private options provide broader coverage than the state’s FAIR Plan, which acts as an insurer of last resort and provides coverage for the structure only, not its contents or other types of damages covered by typical homeowners insurance.
“While having insurance can help mitigate some of the costs associated with fire episodes, our results suggest that insurance does little to improve the adverse effects on property values,” the report said.
While wildfires affect homes across the spectrum of values, many luxury homes in California tend to be located in areas particularly vulnerable to the threat of fire.
“From my experience, the high-end homes tend to be up in the hills,” said Ari Weintrub, a real estate agent with Sotheby’s in Los Angeles. “It’s up and removed from down below.”
That puts them in exposed, vegetated areas where brush or forest fires are a hazard, he said.
While the effect of wildfire risk on home values is minimal for now, it could grow over time, the report warns. “This pattern may become stronger in years to come if residential construction continues to expand into areas with higher fire risk and if trends in wildfire severity continue.”
