All posts by Philip Graves

$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 […]

Meet Willow, she’s going to be helping me with various psychological projects over the coming months. You may recall a previous article where I reviewed a study that looked at how the hormone released when we see an image like that of a puppy (oxytocin) had been shown to increase donations in response to adverts for good causes (here’s a link), and people reported empathising more with the focus of the ad they had seen. This is a case of misattribution: we experience an ‘instinctive’ reaction in our unconscious mind, and misdirect the resulting feeling to something else we encounter around the same time. Of course, you can’t go around squirting hormones up people’s noses, but you can surround your product with oxytocin-inducing imagery (Willow is available for photo shoots, but growing very quickly). Whipping out a picture of a puppy isn’t necessarily that easy either. But there are lots […]