Spring forward = fall back?

In his latest research publication, Asper Assistant Professor and F. Ross Johnson Fellow of Marketing Harsha Kamatham focuses on the impact of a single hour.

Kamatham, with co-authors Ramkumar Janakiraman, Sven Feurer, Rishika Rishika, Bhavna Phogaat, and Marina Girju, examines the effects of daylight saving time in “Spring Forward = Fall Back?” The Effect of Daylight Saving Time Change on Consumers’ Unhealthy Behavior.”

The article has been published in the Journal of Marketing, a prestigious FT 50 publication, one of the top journals in the field,  and a testament to the significance of Kamatham and co-authors’ research questions and findings.

In two studies, Kamatham and his co-authors collected data about consumption habits before and after the twice-annual time change to articulate two compelling findings: first, that the onset of daylight saving time in the spring increases consumption of packaged and processed snacks, and second, that consumers tend to decrease their visits to fitness centres following the onset of daylight saving.

For Kamatham, the topic piqued his interest as a researcher invested in policy analysis, marketing, and how individual consumers and firms respond to changes in policy. He points out that while researchers in other disciplines like medicine have examined the negative impacts of daylight saving’s springing forward, approaches focused on consumer behaviour and marketing were relatively sparse.

“That made us dig into this question: what happens to consumer behaviour around this timeframe? Each year, you lose an hour and basically nothing else seems to change, but we were interested to know what happens in the immediate day or two after we lose that hour. What happens to our behaviour when we make these choices in terms of—in this case—food consumption and visiting fitness centres,” he explains.

For Kamatham, whose doctoral research examined food consumption habits, this project allowed him to draw on expertise while uncovering new and compelling findings. He notes that the impact of daylight saving on fitness centre visits is particularly significant for the paper and the field.

“I think we have just scratched the surface there,” he says, referencing the finding and how the data showed that the distance consumers had to travel to their gym also played a role in how much they were impacted by the time change.

“Future research could build on this finding and examine many things including how habits affect results. There could be implications for businesses in this field, and there could be ways to help consumers that are prone to this effect adapt to the time change,” he suggests.

For consumers pursuing a physically active lifestyle, this work could provide insights into those that are more affected by the time change than others, creating in-roads into strategies to reduce disruption and support positive habits.

“We get used to the time change twice every year, because after that short period of disruption, we do adjust,” he explains. “However, though we adjust, there can still be negative consequences even in the shorter term, and we should be attentive to those effects.”

This attention is at the heart of how Kamatham approaches both his research and teaching. In undergraduate and graduate courses, he teaches digital marketing and emphasizes methodology, encouraging students to think critically about how they understand change and how they can be attentive to and responsive to all kinds of change in their careers, whether they pursue research or find themselves developing marketing campaigns and strategy.

“You have to have that curiosity and that ability to see that what you learn in one experiment or campaign might not be applicable in all settings. You have to develop this mindset of how to run experiments, how to analyze them, and how to draw insights from them,” he explains.

As a researcher, Kamatham offers more than compelling findings about a twice-annual time change that ranges from a mild inconvenience to a disruptive and frustrating policy; he also demonstrates the value of staying curious, seeing every change as an opportunity for new questions and further insight.

 As the clocks fall back, interested readers might well use that extra hour to read Kamatham’s compelling publication.

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The Asper School of Business aims to expand global knowledge and engage in intellectual exploration to advance teaching, learning, and research. Our researchers’ scholarly work is regularly published in internationally renowned publications.

Learn more about research at Asper and recent publications by visiting the Asper Research page, and learn more about research programs in management (MSc and PhD) at the Stu Clark Graduate School here.

Emily Wilson