Monthly Archives: August 2013

$9.99 It’s almost akin to a retail disease. Walk into any shop and the prices frequently end in the same way: $X.99 or $X.95. This used to have some unfortunate consequences. I’m old enough to remember the days when you might well end up carrying around a couple of kilos of small change in your pockets. Then, when the burden got to great, or you got irritated with sounding as though you were wearing a manacle as it ‘chinked’ with each step you took, you would act. The social consequence of spending a disproportionately long time at the checkout would be outweighed by the desire to move freely and you would pay for the next item using as many coins as you could. The upside of this was that it was very good for your mental maths. You would work out how the small change you had could be deployed […]

$9.99 It’s tempting to think that we don’t need anyone to tell us how to save money. Indeed, we may very well believe that we’re very good at saving money. A trip to most stores at the moment is a ‘money saving’ bonanza: with so many great deals around, coupons, voucher codes, referral sites that pay you a reward for buying something you were already going to get, loyalty discount vouchers, GroupOn-style great deals direct to your in-box… only a fool wouldn’t be saving money these days. Except for one thing. Most of the times we believe we’re saving money we’ve been duped into spending it first. A saving of $100 is only a saving if you had intended to spend $300 when you left the house (or started the internet search engine) and then ended up spending $200 because of the great deal you uncovered. If you left the […]

Choice is nice, but also confusing. Research about choice is nice, but also sometimes confusing. The classic psychological experiment on choice is probably the one involving jams in a supermarket. A choice of six was found to lead to substantially more jam being sold than a choice of 24. You may attract people to your abundant display, but they get confused and end up not buying. Other studies on choice have found that when people do choose from a large range they end up feeling less good about their decision: with the gap between good and bad inevitably condensed, unconscious nagging doubts remain about the option selected. However, the situation isn’t as simple as to say that reducing choice will lead to higher sales and happier customers. Customers may reject you for having too little choice. Alternatively, range rationalisation may remove a specific product that someone wants, leading them to […]

If there was to be one consistent theme that runs through all the studies about consumers that I find really interesting, it would be the way in which people allow something that shouldn’t make any difference to what their thinking change their actions or attitudes. There’s no escaping the fact that this is something all of us are capable at one time or another and, the truth is, we do it far more than we would ever be happy admitting to ourselves. Whether it’s people finding a female researcher more attractive because they happen to be standing on a wobbly bridge, or consumers thinking that the same product is more desirable because of the music playing in the room, there are a host of studies that show that we’re routinely influenced outside of conscious awareness. Of course, the fact that such influences are so easily demonstrated in properly controlled experiments […]