Tag: consumer behavior

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Hard Times May Make You More Likely to Gamble Away Your Money

Do people with bleak economic prospects hold more tightly to their money? No, they’re more likely to gamble it away, says a team led by Michael J.A. Wohl of Carleton University in Canada. In an experiment, people were more than twice as likely to gamble $10 on slot machines if they first read an article warning of an unstable economic climate, poor job prospects, and higher costs. Periods of hardship can lead people to make risky and detrimental financial decisions, the researchers say.

neuromarketingconsumer bah

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Consumer Behavior: Tell Them What They Should Do

Most of the times websites are complicated, full of text and don’t think about customer experience or NeuroMarketing basics.

This is a good example of how a website should be. Has a strong emotional promise. (attention to the word “Power” ), it is clean, which allows the eyes to rest and tells right away what you should be doing.

Weight watchers

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Do you work while you eat?

You can say, besides a marketing tip this is also a weight loss tip:

People who were making and tasting lemonade while memorizing a seven-digit number ended up with a 50% higher sugar concentration in the drink than people who were memorizing just one number, say Reine C. van der Wal of Radboud University Nijmegen and Lotte F. van Dillen of Leiden University, both in the Netherlands. This and other experiments suggest that dealing with a cognitive load dulls the experience of taste (not just sweet but also salty and sour), leading people to drink or eat more in order to obtain a pleasurable experience. Abstaining from cognitive activities during meals may enhance taste perception and limit over consumption, the researchers say.


do you eat while you work?

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Why Women Should Ask Auto-Repair Shops for Discounts

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.

Ask Auto-Repair Shops for Discounts

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To Keep Users Happy, Loyalty Programs Must Walk a Fine Line

Users become wary when privacy is called into question

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.

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Cosmetic Surgery Is Fueled by a Fear of Dying

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.

Cosmetic Surgery Is Fueled by a Fear of Dying

SOURCE: Existential motive underlying cosmetic surgery: A terror management analysis

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Consumer Behavior: Prices in Red Affect Men but Not Women

Men who saw red discount prices for toasters and microwaves agreed more strongly that they’d save “a lot of money” than men who saw black prices (4.26 versus 2.56 on a seven-point scale), says a team led by Nancy M. Puccinelli of Oxford’s Saïd Business School. But this didn’t happen when the research subjects were induced to think carefully about the prices, suggesting that red’s happiness-inducing effect sways men’s perception of discounts only when they’re not paying close attention. Women were unaffected by the prices’ color, perhaps because they were already paying closer attention than the men to the discounts, the researchers say.

Consumer Behavior

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Social Followers of Local Media Exhibit Different Patterns of Engagement

What kind of social behaviors do local media fans exhibit on Facebook and Twitter? It depends on the medium, says TVB [pdf] in a study conducted in conjunction with Colligent, that combines Nielsen Media Research and Kantar Media data with social media behaviors. The “Cultural Currency” study analyzes the social media behaviors of 167 million Facebook and Twitter users across a range of legacy media, finding that overall, local broadcast TV viewers tend to be most heavily engaged socially with their stations. For advertisers, understanding how social behaviors vary among fans of various local media is an important consideration when crafting social calls to action to accompany their local media buys.
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The study identifies 9 types of social media behaviors on Facebook and Twitter.

In each case, “fans” refers to Facebook fans of the local media outlet (such as a local radio channel), and “brand” refers to that same outlet. (The 4 media types available in local markets tracked in the study are: local TV; local newspapers; local radio; and cable TV. The study also notes that “due to various sources of programming on local TV stations, local TV is a combination of scores from fans of TV stations, fans of broadcast networks, and fans of broadcast programming.”)

Local media
Overall, local TV was above-average in social behaviors in each of the 9 categories save for 1 (retweeting). While radio listeners exhibited strong tendencies to perform a range of Facebook behaviors, listeners were less likely than average to engage in each of the activities on Twitter. Conversely, while local newspaper garnered above-average Twitter talk and retweets, they fell below-average in Facebook behaviors.
Other Findings:

Social media behaviors also differed greatly across primetime content genres. For example, viewers of mainstream genres, such as reality competition, comedy, and dramas, were more active on Twitter than on Facebook. By contrast, viewers of game shows, travel shows, and action suspense shows were more engaged on Facebook.
Defining “Cultural Currency” as “having achieved both broad audiences and having effected significant social media behaviors,” the study demonstrates that traditional hits (such as specials and primetime dramas) also had the highest levels of Cultural Currency. Advertisers spending almost exclusively on the top quadrant of “Cultural Currency” programs saw 15 times more new brand fans than those advertising in the lowest quadrant over the measured period.

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The Sound of a Number Affects Your Perception of Its Size

In an experiment involving prices for an ice cream scoop, people perceived $7.66 as representing a larger discount from the original $10 price than it actually was (estimating, on average, that it represented a 28.7% reduction, when in reality the difference was 23.4%), and they perceived a price of $7.22 as a smaller discount than it really was, say Keith S. Coulter of Clark University and Robin A. Coulter of the University of Connecticut.

 

People unconsciously associate certain letter sounds, such as the “s” and “i” in “sixty-six,” with smallness and the “t” and “oo” of “twenty-two” with largeness, and these associations interfere with the accuracy of their quantitative perceptions.

 

Source: Small Sounds, Big Deals: Phonetic Symbolism Effects in Pricing