Women who called auto-repair shops to inquire about getting a new radiator were quoted prices that averaged 6% higher than those offered to men, according to an experiment led by Meghan Busse of the Kellogg School at Northwestern University. Yet female callers who requested a price reduction were successful about 35% of the time, compared with just 25% for men. Shops may be caught off guard when women ask for discounts on car repairs, the researchers say.
People who suffer from math anxiety prefer easier-to-process dollar discounts (“$10 off the regular price of $50”) over percentage discounts (“20% off”) and sometimes make suboptimal decisions because of that preference, says a team led by Rajneesh Suri of Drexel University. The math-anxiety effect gets worse when consumers are more highly motivated to process information, such as when a reward is offered. Math anxiety is a condition in which people fear situations requiring the use of math skills and harbor worrisome thoughts about math.
Join Shahar Boyayan and Therese Sparby as they talk about success and mindset, and give you some clear actionable steps to achieve success.
Loyalty programs, especially those delivered via digital channels, provide benefits to consumers and brands alike. Consumers get access to codes and purchases that can boost rewards, while brands are better able to target participating consumers. And since online shoppers tend to favor discounts and deals over brand affinity, brands have even more reason to use loyalty programs to cultivate repeat customers.
According to Maritz Loyalty Marketing’s December 2012 survey, US internet users on average participated in 7.4 loyalty programs last year. And among respondents who’d enrolled in at least one loyalty program during the previous year, retail programs saw the highest participation levels, with the average consumer using 1.7 retail programs. Credit cards and airlines ranked as the second and third most popular industries for loyalty programs, respectively, with consumers participating in slightly more than one of these programs in each category on average.
Eight in 10 consumers overall said they thought loyalty programs were worth participating in. And in a sign that brand loyalty itself isn’t totally dead, 70% of consumers said these programs were part of their relationship to the company. Another 57% acknowledged that loyalty programs actually affected where and how they made their purchases, modifying shopping to maximize rewards.
But there is still a high incidence of consumers turning away from loyalty programs, whether actively or passively. According to the Maritz study, 53% of those enrolled in loyalty programs stopped participating in at least one program in the past year, but only 7% formally requested to leave the program.
And while loyalty programs today may benefit from the ability to target offers based on behavioral and personal details, this also can backfire on brands. Just less than three in 10 respondents said that loyalty programs required too much personal information, and 24% cited privacy concerns as a reason they did not enroll.
Asked about the leading “creepy” ways brands used personal information in administering loyalty programs, the No. 1 cited action was using programs to see details of friends’ behavior, mentioned by more than half of respondents. Offering rewards based on the sharing of personal details such as income was another tactic that many consumers did not appreciate, cited as creepy by 44% of respondents; and another 43% said the same of being asked to provide a credit card number to receive cash back on spending. Two out of five even found the request of personal information to target the consumer based on demographic to be creepy.
The findings suggest that participation in loyalty programs should not be mistaken for total trust in the brand. These are transactional relationships at the core, and brands must be sensitive to how they can provide mutually beneficial rewards that don’t tread too far on consumers’ private lives.
People who were instructed to think about their own mortality were more receptive to the idea of having cosmetic surgery than those who weren’t (3.57 versus 2.96 on a seven-point scale), suggesting that fear of death is a motivator behind patients’ decisions to have tummy tucks, says Kim-Pong Tam of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. When people experience unconscious death terror, they tend to engage in behaviors that maintain their sense of symbolic immortality, even though cosmetic surgery itself can threaten people’s health or even their lives, he writes.
SOURCE: Existential motive underlying cosmetic surgery: A terror management analysis
Here are a few tips on how to optimize your site to engage customers according to NeuroMarketing:
The brain grants attention to visual elements roughly in this order:
I do ask myself that question quite often. All it take is to go out to buy something and I’ll ask again, why do entrepreneurs allow employees to kill their businesses?
This week there was the bad PR case with Taco Bell. An employee posted a picture on social media of him licking some taco shells.
Guess what? It went viral really fast. On the same day that Mashable posted the story, it had over 6,000 shares. On Taco Bell’s Facebook page, 3,000 shares. That is just two places. The damage can be huge to the company. Even though I’m not a big fan of fast food, I for sure plan not to get anywhere near a Taco Bell in the future. One guy, one picture and a huge nightmare.
Now you might be saying that no one could really avoid this type of thing. Well, maybe with some very specific training you could. Not just training on how to handle food and customers but training about the company’s values, level of engagement they expect from employees. Also public stand on what you believe in. At Taco Bell’s Facebook page there is only a small comment from the company saying that they take this type of stuff very seriously. Well, we all hope you do.
Two days ago I went to a Petsmart near my home to gt some things for my dog Apple and my cat banana. One of the things I wanted was a new mat to put under my cat’s food tray. I saw some in clearance but they all had issues. On the proper isle I saw other mats and picked one and was looking at the prices. An employee comes and asks if I need any help. I said “I’m thinking of buying a mat for my cat but think these prices are really high”. She replies “They are. They are really expensive. I would never get one here, I’d go to Walmart”.
She was very nice but I felt guilty that I was even holding the mat and I did put it back.
Now, how can someone that works for you, tell customers to go buy some place else. Because of price?
I bet she is well trained on how to deal with customers but how much does she really know about the company, how much of the company’s culture is presented to her on a daily basis?
Unbelievable!
One of my clients has a restaurant. Every time there is a new promotion, survey or flyer he tells his employees what they have to do. They never do. They decide what is important or not. Not the owner.
Now, why are they making decisions? Why no one demands that orders be followed?
What is going on in business today?
Here is another episode of Spill the Beans TV. Kris Barney talks about overcoming challenges in life and in business. Great story!
New episode of Spill the Beans Tv. This time with Kris Barney.
Talk about having challenges in life and how to overcome them. Kris Barney shares her story with us and show how entrepreneurs can overcome difficult times.
