Taking the Pain out of Sushi Pricing

The menu designer for an Austin restaurant, Roll On Sushi Diner, must be a Neuromarketing or Brainfluence reader. A while back, I identified sushi-style pricing as being the worst possible approach because each tiny bite is a separate pain point (see Painful Sushi and Other Pricing Blunders).

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What’s Better Than an Excited Customer?

Think the way to sell more is to have a frenetic pitchman whip customers into a buying frenzy? Actually, relaxed customers are bigger spenders. A new study that will appear in the Journal of Marketing Research found that relaxed subjects would pay about 15% more for a variety of goods and services than less-relaxed subjects. [...]

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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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Neuro-Menus and Restaurant Psychology

Restaurants are great test labs for testing neuromarketing techniques. It’s easy to change offerings, menus, and pricing, and one gets immediate feedback on what’s working and what’s not. Today, many eateries are employing sophisticated menu psychology to maximize sales and profits.

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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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