The Truffle Strategy: Tempt Your Customers

Could eating a chocolate treat make you want to buy a TV or a cruise? The surprising answer is YES! At a mall I used to frequent, there was a candy kiosk that always offered a sample chocolate to each passerby. I wondered about the economics of that practice – it seemed that almost everyone [...]

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The Power of FREE!

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 economist, previously [...]

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Why Advertising is Like Chocolate

One of the fears raised by critics of neuromarketing is that by observing the brains of subjects reacting to ads, marketers will be able to make those ads much more manipulative than those developed using conventional approaches. I don’t believe this will happen (as much as some marketers would like it to), and the answer [...]

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