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Pricing Lessons from Restaurants

7. January 2010

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My last Neuromarketing post, Neuro-Menus and Restaurant Psychology, talked about various things restaurant menu engineers do to maximize sales and profits. I think it’s worth calling special attention to one aspect touched on in that post: how price presentation affects sales. Not, the price itself, which of course is very important, but the [...]

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Ants and Humans

3. December 2009

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Ants and Humans

If the late Nobel Laureate Herb Simon were still around, I’m sure he’d be fascinated by neuromarketing. He did a lot to explode myths of human behavior, notably that people always behave in a rational, utility-maximizing, manner. I never met Simon during my student years at Carnegie-Mellon (though I did serve on a [...]

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Brain Fight: Who’s the Decider?

13. October 2009

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One of my favorite chapters in How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer is The Brain is an Argument. In this chapter, Lehrer highlights how complex our decision-making process really is, and how competing options battle for supremacy.

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Banking Mess: Blame Our Brains

26. September 2008

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As the current financial chaos moves toward some kind of resolution, there will no doubt be plenty of Monday morning quarterbacking to explain what went wrong. One group that one wouldn’t expect to have explanations are neuroscientists. As it turns out, neuroscience researchers actually can shed some light on why things went so [...]

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Danger in Discounts

8. August 2008

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I’m a sucker for discounts. Show me something that costs $50, tell me I can have it for $25, and my hand will be reaching for my wallet while my brain is still trying to figure out whether I need the item at any price. Most of us respond that way – our [...]

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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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Bikinis, Babes, and Buying

24. June 2008

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Scantily clad women have been used to sell products to men for decades, and likely for millennia in one form or another. There’s little doubt that the typical male brain is wired to respond to attractive females in revealing attire. But is this a cheap attention-getting trick that has no real impact on [...]

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Neuroeconomics and Investment Insanity

13. June 2008

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The human brain didn’t evolve to pick stocks, which explains why there are so few Warren Buffets among the ranks of fund managers. Jason Zweig, author of Your Money & Your Brain (reviewed in Ignore Your Brain and Get Rich), did a lengthy interview with the Journal of Indexes. The publication, which seems [...]

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Sexy Pics Beat Ugly Spiders

3. April 2008

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Erotic images sell better than pictures of office supplies, and a lot better than photos of hairy spiders. Who knew? Actually, that’s a bit of an oversimplification. Stanford researchers led by neuroeconomics prof Brian Knutson have found that positive images, in this case mildly erotic photos of [...]

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B2B Marketing: Play Fair, Maximize Profit

18. March 2008

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Businesses are often portrayed as rapacious partners, seeking to squeeze every penny out of their deals. Indeed, some are… the result is often a relationship between defined by a fat contract that seeks to protect both parties against bad behavior by the other. New research, which draws on both conventional research and brain-scan [...]

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