Can Mountain Dew Make You Smarter than Pinot Noir?

When can a Mountain Dew make you smarter than a glass of a nice Pinot Noir? Well, beyond the short-term cognitive boost from the caffeine-rich soft drink, being seen holding a glass of wine can reduce your intelligence – not in real terms, but in the eyes of others. As I posted on Forbes.com the [...]

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Use Ratings to Improve REAL Satisfaction

It’s no surprise that most of us will adjust our own expressed views to those around us. If your friends are raving about the meal you all just ate, you might tend to go with the flow rather than being the solo critic. Perhaps you simply don’t want to annoy your friends or perhaps you [...]

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Please Your Guests by Fooling Them

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. Besides, you are [...]

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Why Expensive Wine Tastes Better

For Neuromarketing readers, it’s not big news that the perception of wine drinkers is altered by what they know about the wine (see Wine and the Spillover Effect, for example). Now, researchers at Stanford and Caltech have demonstrated that people’s brains experience more pleasure when they think they are drinking a $45 wine instead of [...]

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Wine Tasting Trickery

Wine and coffee seem to be common topics here at Neuromarketing. Perhaps it’s because I enjoy both, but also because each of these beverages comes in an infinite variety of flavors and is available in varied methods of delivery. We’ve learned that the coffee sensory experience is greatly influenced by the coffee shop environment and [...]

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Wine and the Spillover Effect

Would wine thought to be from California taste better than wine from North Dakota, even if it was poured from the same bottle? It’s no surprise that the answer is “yes” – in Preschool Branding we described how even young children say branded food tastes better than identical unbranded items. For wine, California is a [...]

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