Stronger Contracts, Less Trust

Business agreements are usually secured by written agreements that define the obligations of the parties and state what happens under various conditions. Having been party to a few business deals launched based mostly on enthusiasm and…

Sands Research Targets 1.3 Billion Brains

In 1996, John Keating wrote a book titled Two Billion Armpits: How Experts Sell China What It Really Wants, referring to the size of the consumer goods market in China. Texas-based Sands Research is writing a new chapter that might be…

License to Misbehave

In Dietary Decoys, we saw that adding salads to a restaurant menu actually increased sales of french fries. Research in Taiwan exposes an equally odd fact: if we take a nutritional supplement like a multivitamin, we are MORE likely to…

Prediction Power: Asking Gets Results

Are you telling customers to buy your product? Maybe you should be asking them about their intentions instead. Research shows that if you want to get people to do something, you should ask them to predict if they will do it. An…

Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein

Nudge is all about choice architecture, a discipline which structures choices in a way that produces the most beneficial outcome. I don't have to tell Neuromarketing readers that humans often behave in conflict with the traditional…

Furry Cat Ears Show Your Mood

Guess in which country someone would think it a great idea to develop big, furry cat ears that sit on your head and are supposed to show your mood. If you guessed Japan, you would be right. A little sensor arm presses against your…

Better Packaging via Neuromarketing

What's better than a chocolate chip cookie? A chocolate chip cookie in a package optimized with neuromarketing. Consumer companies don't often talk about their neuromarketing efforts, perhaps because of the vaguely scary sound of it all.…

Cool Brain Art

Last month was the conclusion of Brain-Art Competition 2011, and some of the entries are really intriguing. There were four categories of entry:

Apologies Really DO Work

Have you ever annoyed a potential customer, or made her angry? Before you decide to ignore the faux pas and press forward with the pitch, or write her off and move on to greener pastures, try this simple technique: say, "I'm sorry."…

The Upside of Irrationality by Dan Ariely

Nobody is doing more to add to our knowledge of the irrational side of human behavior than Dan Ariely. Not only does he conduct experiments that are elegant in their simplicity, but he writes about his work and that of other researchers in…