Tag: sales
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Psychological Pricing and Other Shopping Persuasion Techniques
The endowment effect, sex in advertising and pricing anchors: all bits of ‘shopping psychology’ we’ve heard before. Ryan Sager looks at these shopping persuasion techniques we should be aware of, adding a few small pieces of information that may be novel: Endowment effect: We place a higher value on items we own, and just by…
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Optimum Starting Prices for Negotiations and Auctions (and Why)
A high initial offer in negotiations is more likely to lead to a high final price, yet in auctions a low start price is more likely to lead to a high final price. These are the findings of a recent study that attempted to find the optimal starting prices for negotiations and auctions. In negotiations…
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(Preventing) Manipulation Through Irrationality
Through the theories discussed in Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational (and largely based on the excerpts in Chris Yeh’s outline of the book), two articles have emerged on different sides of one topic: our irrational decision-making in terms of products and purchases. One on how to take advantage of our irrationality when marketing products, and another…
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Influencing Behaviour Online
Ignoring, for a moment, the rather unsound and outmoded neuroscience propounded in the introduction, these tips for extending influence online and persuading your visitors are worth a few minutes: Show ratings and reviews by other users (for action through social validation). Provide instant gratification and a quick fix. Put the most important action to be…
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Scarcity Marketing
Neuromarketing has recently been looking at The Scarcity Effect: WORCHEL, LEE, AND ADEWOLE (1975) asked people to rate chocolate chip cookies. They put 10 cookies in one jar and two of the same cookies in another jar. The cookies from the two-cookie jar received higher ratings—even though the cookies were exactly the same! Not only…
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How Do Free Online Book Releases Affect Sales?
Do free book releases (gratis and/or libre) affect books sales in a positive or negative way? To try and find out, John Hilton of Brigham Young University tracked the sales of books 8 weeks prior and following a number of promotional free release from various publishers. On March 4 of this year, Random House announced…
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Psychology of Sales
Retailers aren’t in sales; they’re “in the perception business”, says Jonah Lehrer while discussing how we perceive goods of varying prices, especially discounted goods. Consumers typically suffer from a version of the placebo effect. Since we expect cheaper goods to be less effective, they generally are less effective, even if they are identical to more…
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False Advertising (With Statistics) Works
Recent advertising research shows how numerical specifications drastically influence our choices: even if they’re meaningless and contradict our personal experience. Bigger numbers, it seems, are what we want: no matter how abstract or inane. The first test involved megapixels. The authors took a single image, and used Photoshop to create a sharper version, and one…