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Neuroscience Research
New research in neuroscience
When Loyalty Points Beat Price Differences
Every merchant seems to have a loyalty program these days. It makes sense to reward customers for their patronage and encourage even greater frequency. But, it appears there's one kind of loyalty reward that may be more effective.…
Brain Rules for Baby
Review: Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five
Want to make your baby a genius? There's good news and bad news. The bad news: virtually all of the commercial products that claim to boost your…
Border Bias: How to Beat It
When we lived in Indiana, our first house was quite ordinary but had one feature some found a little odd: one edge of our little lot was the Michigan state line. An errant frisbee throw required one to retrieve the disc from another…
Does Paper Outweigh Digital?
We know that viewing information on paper causes more emotional processing in the brain than the same information viewed on a screen (see Paper Beats Digital for Emotion), and there's another way paper might be better: its weight. The…
Seating Secret: How To Soften Up Your Prospects
If the last time you bought a car the salesperson offered you a soft, comfortable chair, there are two possible explanations:
1) The salesperson was genuinely concerned about your comfort during a stressful negotiation.
2) The…
The Last Name Effect: Why Zimmerman is Impatient
WARNING: If your last name starts with a letter from R to Z, you may be more susceptible to urgent-sounding sales pitches.
As a direct marketer, I tried all manners of segmenting my mailing lists. Some of the best ways to slice…
University Neuromarketing Lab Opens
Iowa State University has officially opened their new neuromarketing laboratory in the Gerdin Business Building on their Ames campus. The new lab, led by marketing professor Terry Childers, will use EEG to study consumer…
It Really DOES Pay to Schmooze
One of my all-time favorite TV commercials is the classic 1990 United Airlines spot that shows a manager distributing plane tickets to the sales staff so they can visit their customers in person. This was filmed in the days before email…
Computers As People: Happy Customers and Automation
Forget the Turing Test! (That test, proposed in 1950, was a measure of machine intelligence that required a machine to interact with a person so effectively that the person could not distinguish it from a human.) But you don't have to…
Rivalry Marketing
Sometimes the best thing for a brand is an enemy: a rival brand that can be the focus of advertising. The other day, Mark Gallagher and Laura Savard at the BlackCoffee blog put the advantage of focusing on a rival succinctly:
