marketing

The Secrecy Effect

Advertisers often depict their products being consumed in a social setting, but increasingly they also depict people secretly consuming their products. Will consumers like a product more if they are prompted to consume it in secret? New research explores this question, finding that prompting women to think about consuming products in secret has an impact, not only on product evaluations, but also on behavior and willingness to pay for those products. The authors refer to this effect as the “secrecy effect.”

Why We Use Less Information Than We Think to Make Decisions

How much information do you need to make up your mind? Our research in various domains of decision making shows that we make decisions more quickly and based on less information than we think. This has important implications in an age in which information is plentiful.

Why We’re Loving It: The Psychology Behind the McDonald’s Restaurant of the Future

Insights into the innovative behavioural design that underpins McDonald’s reinvention.

Mental Money: The Psychology of Subscription Payment Options

What goes through your head when choosing between different payment options?

What Do We Know about Trust?

Every year, millions of people invest money in projects they may not fully understand and, by choosing to do so, they reveal one of the most important values that holds our society and our economy together: trust. What do we know about trust? Read this post to find out.

Three Ways the Internet of Things Is Shaping Consumer Behavior

The interconnection of devices within the “Internet of Things” (IoT) creates new data sources. Companies can now better observe people’s choices and test the effectiveness of different mechanisms to activate and retain more customers. It may also help policymakers overcome one of the most frequent problems of policy design: the lack of personalized content. We argue that the IoT not only disrupts the way we track our actions and monitor our goals, but also allows the identification of effective methods to alter our behavior. This is optimized by the combination of IoT, data analytics and behavioral science.

A Nudge in the Green Direction

Despite good intentions, environmentally friendly attitudes do not always translate into corresponding food choices (the so-called intention-behavior gap). To investigate the potential benefits of behavioral nudges, the Flemish government’s Environmental, Nature and Energy Department, together with its partners, conducted tests in several retail locations. The results of our research are reported in this post.

Big Data Is Nudging You

Slow to hit the purchase button? Here’s how you may be nudged to buy.

The Artist Is Present

Emerging insights on “temporal contagion” explain the unusual contours of limited-edition markets.

The Battle for Consumers Is Often about Beliefs, Not Consumer Experience

Marketers increasingly mold their work around the customer experience. They manufacture rich, immersive interactions, carefully crafted to resonate with consumers. A 1998 Harvard Business Review article on the ‘experience economy’ noted that “experiences are a distinct economic offering.” Quite simply, the argument runs that delightful customer experiences add value and build loyalty. And yet many companies find that objective improvements to products and services, which are central to experience, don’t translate into customers or revenue. The fact is, renovating experience is insufficient, because how we perceive an experience depends deeply on our beliefs and intuitions.

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