Negative Shipping, Less Pain, More Gain

If there's one persistent theme here at Neuromarketing, it's that good offers reduce buying pain for consumers, and bad offers increase it. My fellow Web marketer and occasional PubCon co-panelist Andy Beal has identified an ad that he…

Study: Taxes Aren’t Painful

Often, neuromarketing and neuroeconomic research seems to mostly confirm what we already knew, but a study at the University of Oregon produced results that are counter to what one might expect: rather than activating pain centers in the…

Lexus – Less Pain, More Gain

Last week we posted about Seth Godin's Joy/Cash Curve and Buying Pain. We think that at least some marketers already understand the problem Godin raises and are trying to address it. One auto brand, Lexus, goes out of its way to, as Godin…

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…

Love Your Returns!

I hated returns when I was in the catalog business. I viewed returns, not without reason, as margin-killing time-wasters. The returned merchandise was often unsellable due to customer damage, missing items, or shopworn packaging. I…

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…

The Neuromarketing of Burgers

There's hardly a shortage of places to buy hamburgers in the US, but the restaurant chain Five Guys has opened 300 stores in the last five years, and has contracts for many more. Locally, I'd been hearing about the fantastic hamburgers…

Brain Fight: Who’s the Decider?

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.

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…