This research demonstrates that a marketing claim placed on a package is more believable than a marketing claim placed in an advertisement. In three studies, we show that the benefit of greater believability for packages is driven by perceptions of proximity. In general, consumers perceive packages, and thus the claims they offer, as closer to the product than ads and their respective claims. This perception of greater claim‐to‐product proximity is likely to make a claim seem more verifiable. Therefore, claim‐to‐product proximity is taken as a signal of the marketers' credibility, decreasing inferences of manipulative intent and thereby increasing claim believability and purchase likelihood.

We observe the influence of aesthetic design on consumer behavior involving financial products—an area where financial decision‐makers say they do not take aesthetics into account. In a series of three studies we find that the look of a document in hypothetical investment decisions impacts stock valuation and behavior in some but not all situations. Specifically, our results show that calling attention to the influence of design on behavior moderates the effect, including the paradoxical finding that the effect of design is attenuated when investments involve entities for which aesthetics is of intrinsic value.