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.

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…

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…

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…

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…

Most scientists have dismissed the idea of reading minds using technology as pure science fiction, but Carnegie Mellon University researchers have moved a step closer to doing so. Not only have they been able to identify which of several…

I've often said that the most exciting application of neuromarketing techniques isn't that of choosing or developing advertisements, but rather designing better products. While some may feel that enhancing ad effectiveness with brain scans…

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…

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…