Archive | July, 2008

Please Your Guests by Fooling Them

28. July 2008

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Imagine that you are shopping for a few bottles of wine for your next dinner party. You probably aren’t going to buy from the cheapest selections. You don’t want your guests to think you are a cheapskate, or that you have such a low opinion of them that you’d serve them plonk. [...]

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The Time Value of Bananas

23. July 2008

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We didn’t need Econ 101 to learn that a dollar in the future isn’t worth as much as a dollar today. Our brains knew that all along. And, as it turns out, monkey brains know it too. The Pure Pedantry blog has a lengthy post on research showing that monkeys have a high [...]

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Clever Wine Marketing

23. July 2008

10 Comments

How do you market a product that your customers know is bad before they try it, and which they may well dislike if they do? That’s the dilemma faced by makers of boxed wines – even those of high quality that would fare well in a blind tasting.
Wine is such a subjective [...]

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Feeling Itchy?

22. July 2008

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I’m guessing marketers of products for itch relief, athlete’s foot, and the like already know this… but itching can be stimulated by seeing other people scratch, and even by images of itch-causing creatures like bedbugs. Last month’s Scientific American Mind had a interesting article on the neuroscience of chronic itching. Much of it [...]

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Will Driving Habits Really Change?

21. July 2008

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Just about every news pundit on TV has declared that THIS is finally the oil price change that shocks Americans out of their gas-guzzling ways. It’s hard to argue with that logic. Trucks and big SUVs are piling up on dealer lots. Consumers looking to trade in one of those thirsty vehicles [...]

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Anchor Pricing Strategies

18. July 2008

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Here’s a scenario… You decide to venture into a cell phone store despite your reluctance to deal with a bewildering number of phones, options, plans, along with a confusing price structure. As usual, you find you’ll have to wait a bit for a salesperson. The greeter hands you a card with a big [...]

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Decoy Marketing

14. July 2008

24 Comments

Need to sell more of a product or service? Here’s a counterintuitive idea: offer your customers a similar, but inferior, at about the same price. While it’s unlikely that they will actually buy the less attractive item, you may see a jump in sales of what you are trying to sell. [...]

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Neuropolicy Center at Emory

11. July 2008

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Emory University has announced the establishment of a new Center for Neuropolicy. The focus of the entity will be on the intersection of brain science, individual decision making, and politics.
A new Center for Neuropolicy at Emory University will focus on how the biology of the brain influences decision-making in politics, policy and business. As [...]

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The Power of FREE!

10. July 2008

27 Comments

A few days ago, I wrote about the power of the word “New” to get our attention – if there’s a more potent attractor out there, it’s almost certainly “FREE!” For years, advertising gurus have listed “free” on every compilation of powerful headline words. Now, research conducted by Dan Ariely (a Duke behavioral [...]

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Book Review: Predictably Irrational

7. July 2008

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Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely does a great job of demolishing the idea that people make decisions in a rational manner. Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke, describes dozens of experiments that show how we procrastinate, when we cheat, how we interpret prices (definitely a neuromarketing hot button), and much more. Ariely’s work [...]

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