Painful Games Companies Play

Does your company play painful games with your customers? I’m not talking about physical pain, but brain pain. More specifically, what has been termed buying pain or the pain of paying. According to research conducted by George Loewenstein of CMU and others, this pain is triggered when we are presented with a product and price [...]

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Five Ways to Sell in a Bad Economy

Some of my more popular posts over time have been those dealing with selling to two different customer groups: spendthrifts, who spend money freely, and tightwads, who don’t part with their money easily. (See Five Keys to Selling to Spendthrifts, Tightwads, Spendthrifts, and Everyone Else and Five Keys to Selling to Tightwads). It’s safe to [...]

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Will Driving Habits Really Change?

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 find that its [...]

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Anchor Pricing Strategies

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 “97″ printed [...]

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Princess Puts Pain into Cruising

Regular cruise ship passengers almost always say that cruising is the least painful way to travel. Once you are on the ship, there’s no packing or unpacking as you visit new destinations, and you are pampered 24/7. Your cabin is straightened and cleaned several times per day, and an endless cornucopia of food is available. [...]

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Starbucks Trying to Cut Buyer Pain

As described many times here at Neuromarketing, paying for a product activates the brain’s pain center, particularly if the price seems too high to the person making the buying decision. Starbucks is the company that taught us that $5 for a cup of coffee (or at least for a skinny mocha peppermint latte with an [...]

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How To Increase Customer Pain

Big companies often find great ways to aggravate their customers, and cell phone giant Sprint proves the point. John Wall of the Ronin Marketing blog posted a rant about Sprint’s advertising for their Centro Palm smartphone, Screw Your Customers. Wall was understandably miffed when he found out that the $99 advertised price for the phone [...]

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Penalty Pain: How to Make Your Customers Hate You

Neuromarketing readers are by now familiar with the idea of “buying pain” or “pain of paying” – when we buy something, the pain center in our brain can be activated. Work by Carnegie Mellon’s George Loewenstein and others shows that this effect is greatest when the price is perceived to be high or unfair. Buying [...]

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Five Keys to Selling to Tightwads

One out of four potential customers for your product may not buy it, even if the purchase makes economic sense or is otherwise a good decision. A couple of days ago, in Tightwads, Spendthrifts, and Everyone Else, I wrote about research that found people could be categorized by their spending behavior into three major groups. [...]

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Tightwads, Spendthrifts, and Everyone Else

Marketers love to segment their potential customers, and now there’s a new way to do it: spendthrifts, tightwads, and everyone else. Research at Carnegie Mellon University shows that 40% of consumers can be classified as either spendthrifts or tightwads, while 60% fall into a middle category without strong tendencies in either direction. Furthermore, this behavior [...]

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