gwendolyn faith is not a crayon.
I work in advertising. I play in the kitchen.
I’m part tweenager. (Look at my iTunes playlist.)
I’m part Grandma. (Look at my oversize cardi collection.)
I’m part Romy or Michelle. (Look at the height of my hair.)
I love the Lord even more than I love cheese. So, a lot.
I wish my life were a musical, but other than that, I’m pretty content.
F.S. Michaels in the Brain Pickings post “Monoculture: How Our Era’s Dominant Story Shapes Our Lives”
That was grad school in a nutshell, y’all.
Behavioral economist Dan Ariely in the Wall Street Journal essay “Why We Lie”
What motivates people to lie? What holds them back or drives them forward as they make a decision, however suddenly, to lie? It’s like a consumer journey!
I was reading this great book, and I found out something which may be useful for economists: that moment when you make a decision among close alternatives, is purely emotional. This is what the book has to say:It’s purely emotional, the moment you pick. People with brain damage to their emotional centers who have been rendered into Spock-like beings of pure logic find it impossible to decide things as simple as which brand of cereal to buy. They stand transfixed in the aisle, contemplating every element of their potential decision—the calories, the shapes, the net weight—everything. They can’t pick because they have no emotional connection to anything.
This is why companies are now starting to limit the variety in their product lines (the consummate example being Apple, of course), because it makes it easier to make an emotional connection and create post-hoc rationalizations about your choice. It may seem a little manipulative but this decision-making heuristic makes our lives easier; one just has to realize their cognitive biases.
It’s quite in line with the bounded rationality of behavioral economics; that people make choices rationally but only up to the extent of what they know and how they think. If this interests you, Predictably Irrational and other books by Ariely are great reads.
I read Predictably Irrational a few years ago, but three years into my advertising coursework, the book would be worth another read through a more critical eye!
Research on the so-called Zero Moment of Truth — the moment when a shopper goes online to research a product and decides whether to make a purchase — suggests consumers often make purchase decisions in-store, as they read peer-to-peer reviews on their smartphones. I wonder if emotional consumer reviews are more emotional than more matter-of-fact or features-driven reviews. How do reviews, which so many shoppers rely on, facilitate an emotional connection, anyway, if they can at all?
From HBR’s Daily Stat:
In an experiment that provided participants with an opportunity to buy a discounted coffee mug, those who were told they had been randomly selected to get the discount were 3 times more likely to want to buy than people who believed everyone got the discount. Researchers Jerry M. Burger and David F. Caldwell of Santa Clara University say such “special” opportunities may be appealing because people’s self-esteem is tied to factors that distinguish them from the crowd.
David Brooks in “The Unexamined Society,” a July 2011 op-ed piece that suggests scarcity produces its own cognitive traits — ones that impair rational thinking.
A quick question: What is the starting taxi fare in your city? If you are like most upper-middle-class people, you don’t know. If you are like many struggling people, you do know. Poorer people have to think hard about a million things that affluent people don’t. They have to make complicated trade-offs when buying a carton of milk: If I buy milk, I can’t afford orange juice. They have to decide which utility not to pay.
These questions impose enormous cognitive demands. The brain has limited capacities. If you increase demands on one sort of question, it performs less well on other sorts of questions.
