The poll I ran earlier this week in Is Your Brand Evil produced results that, in retrospect, were predictable. Fully half the respondents thought that branding could be used in either good or bad ways. Of the other half, my…

A vivid story can put us in a more altruistic mode, a study shows. UK researchers looked at the two ways people think about death - abstractly or specifically. They used a detailed story which placed the reader in a burning apartment…

Stupidity appears to be contagious, and you can catch it from the media you consume. Researcher Markus Appel had college students read a story about a "foolish soccer hooligan" who got drunk, got into fights, etc., or a more neutral…

We know that viewing information on paper causes more emotional processing in the brain than the same information viewed on a screen (see Paper Beats Digital for Emotion), and there's another way paper might be better: its weight. The…

If the last time you bought a car the salesperson offered you a soft, comfortable chair, there are two possible explanations: 1) The salesperson was genuinely concerned about your comfort during a stressful negotiation. 2) The…

Sometimes the best thing for a brand is an enemy: a rival brand that can be the focus of advertising. The other day, Mark Gallagher and Laura Savard at the BlackCoffee blog put the advantage of focusing on a rival succinctly:

The comments on "Revealed: How Steve Jobs Turns Customers into Fanatics" show that many Apple fans don't believe marketing has played a role in Apple's success. Other consumers also think they aren't influenced by ads. When a business…

The simple answer is that, much as viewing images of attractive women made men impatient, looking at logos of fast food restaurants caused an increase in impatient behavior. Researchers at the University of Toronto found that simply…

Want to boost your creativity by investing a quarter or so? Buy a lightbulb. Not the fancy LED, halogen, or compact fluorescent variety - just the old-fashioned, cheap incandescent kind that come in four-packs for a buck or so.…

I've written a few times about the effects of pictures of attractive women on decision-making by men. In Bikinis, Babes, and Buying, we learned that guys who looked at pictures of bikini-clad women made impulsive decisions. In A…