Cyber Monday is one of those recent inventions that seems a bit suspect. Is the Monday after Thanksgiving really the biggest ecommerce sales day? It looks like Cyber Monday will have to work hard to beat Black Friday, when reports indicate…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 had…

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…

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 and…

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.