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A Shopping-Scanner Darkly
An anonymous reader writes "Using functional MRI scans, researchers have found which parts of the brain are active when people consider buying something and can predict whether or not they'll ultimately bite. One of the main findings was that rather than weighing a choice between the pleasure of making a purchase and the delayed gratification of using the dough for something else, the brain is actually weighing between the pleasure of buying and the pain of forking over the cash."
Is today Philip K Dick http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_k_dick day or what? http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/ 03/1829258
Always back up, never back down. ---- Think you're cool 'cos your uid is prime? Take mine, modulo the one digit integers
Show them all sorts of products with insanely low prices (new 19" LCDs from $99, 300 GB hard drives from $30, etc, etc) and see their reaction. Obviously, it will be positive. Then show them the (obviously) marked up shipping costs ($100 for the monitor, $70 for the hard drive). Then they should react negatively. Continue with the pattern until you find a point at which the person no longer is interested in low prices and considers looking at higher priced items to see if the shipping cost is normal.
Certainly would have interesting results...
I can see two likely results from this phenomenon. First, impulse purchases will be for a relatively low amount of money. People are less reluctant to part with a couple bucks. Secondly, larger purchases will be planned. The planning allows the purchaser to justify releasing the larger amount money.
I'd like to know if this extends to purchases made with others' money. Does a company purchase agent's brain operate the same way? Several jokes have been made in earlier threads about women buying shoes with the posters' credit card--does this effect still occur when the purchaser isn't personally responsible for the spending?
Well, really, most people who sign up for credit cards in order to get the free handouts are doing so because they already know their credit is sub-par, so they feel they've got nothing to lose.
I remember back when I was in college, I basically had no credit info on file. I was a "ghost" in the machine, essentially. I was living in an apartment with a roommate who got the place under their name and info, so there was no record of me paying rent. I bought my first car, used, with a personal check - so again, no car loan. Nobody would issue me a credit card, because I was too uncertain of a risk. Therefore, when I went to a hockey game and was offered the "free t-shirt" with the team logo on it for applying for some VISA card, sure - I did it! Who cares? I knew I'd get turned down, but I got a free shirt for 2 minutes of my time filling out the form.
I think that is more adequately explained by human stupidity... There is clearly a cost to handing over your personal data. I don't want blizzards of junk mail to descend upon me, so I don't even use my home address anywhere. These people just haven't taken the time to think about the results of their actions, thus their brain is unable to make the cost/benefit comparison; since they haven't thought rationally about the cost, it seems that there is none (but for some time which college students typically have in abundance, save for certain times of year.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That's why you have to bring the supermarket into the MRI.
What's cool about this study is that people were making decisions to buy with real money. They actually received the products they chose, for a price. fMRI studies, like much of cognitive science, often gravitates towards abstracted situations so that they can be tightly controlled. What's exciting is that now we are moving more towards scanning real-life situations.
Advertisers and retail consultants of all sorts have a tremendous hunger for information. Anything they can measure might give them an advantage over their competition and the lengths they will go to are determined only by the competitiveness of the market they are in.
I do a fair amount of product photography. I sometimes sit in meetings where advertising and marketing people will go over my photos to pick the ones they want to use. The bulk of what they base their decisions on is how a particular shot makes them 'feel'. That and a whole host of boring antocedotes about how many seconds X type of person will spend making a buying decision about Y product and what factors will weight most heavily in determining the purchase. Some of the things they claim to know amaze me, that anyone would bother to study them.
What I've learned from all this is that every single aspect of any large chain store you visit will be the way it is because of some study (and sometimes by some vendor paying for a better position for their product). The color of the walls, the floor, the lighting. The way items are arranged on the shelf. The position of the packages. Their height above the floor. The quantity of each item and the selection within a category. The graphics on the package. The music playing overhead. The uniforms on the employees. The presence or absence of employees in a particular area. The relative position of competing products, of complementary products. The arrangement of departments throughout the store. The ease of ingress or egress in the parking lot. The lighting in the parking lot. The type of front doors. Signage. Leaflets. Whizzing spinning blinking lights to alert you the something wonderful is about to happen, some item will be deeply discounted.
Absolutely everything about every visit to every national level retailer will have been picked over in meetings both by the marketing department of the store you are in and by the marketing department of the product in that store.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
If stores want a better hold of a customer's wallet, shouldn't they perhaps focus a little less on the actual putting of items in baskets, and suchlike, and a little more focus on the actual forking over of cash?
If they manage to somehow make that experience easier for customers, perhaps they will find themselves more inclined to fork cash over to their stores rather than their rival's.