Blog Entries tagged 'Consumer Behavior'

Price is Right? Placebo Effects in Marketing

rsambandam@trchome.com — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 01:00:00 +0100

It is no secret that consumers often perceive a price-quality relationship, attributing higher quality to products for which they pay more. A large body of pricing research supports the existence of this phenomenon and it is not hard to find personal examples. But what happens when price is compared to objective quality as measured by say, Consumer Reports? Strangely, the relationship between price and quality almost completely disappears. Why? New research points to a placebo action in marke [...]

Of Tightwads and Spendthrifts

rsambandam@trchome.com — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 01:00:00 +0100

Do you spend money a little too easily or does it hurt to spend at all? Do you wonder if you are the only one or if other people have the same problem too? Does your gender, age or income have anything to do with whether you are a tightwad or a spendthrift? What effect do marketing offers have on your tendency to hand over the cash, or for that matter, your credit card? Recent research shows that tightwads and spendthrifts do exist and are quite different in these behaviors.

Definition [...]

Jeopardy! Explains Gender Differences

rsambandam@trchome.com — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 01:00:00 +0100

OK, so Jeopardy! cannot possibly explain all the differences between the genders, but it helps quite a bit in understanding financial risk taking because of its unique format. Researchers studying gender differences in risk taking have known that men and women are different in several ways. For example, in general men are more willing to take risks, single women allocate less wealth to risky assets compared to single men, women have lower risk tolerance on health and retirement issues, women [...]

Babyface CEOs - Good or Bad?

rsambandam@trchome.com — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 01:00:00 +0100

Do you form judgments of others based on how they look? Very likely. These judgments are not just about commonly understood features such as skin color, but also about more subtle ones like the shape of a person's face. Research has shown that babyfaced people are seen as kinder, warmer and physically weaker than maturefaced people, as well as more honest and naive. Given this, are there consequences for a company that has a babyface CEO (or spokesperson) in a time of crisis? Will the sha [...]

More or Less?

rsambandam@trchome.com — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 01:00:00 +0100

Let's say you are a cell phone manufacturer and you have to make a decision about a new phone. Your clever engineers have developed several new features that could make your phone much more distinctive in the market. What do you do? Do you put as many features as you can into one phone, or do you introduce several phones, each with a different set of features? Researchers at the University of Maryland asked this question and conducted a series of experiments to answer it. Surprisingly, [...]

What You See is Not What You Drink

rsambandam@trchome.com — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 01:00:00 +0100

In a series of classic studies done in the 1960's, the Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget showed how children can misperceive volume. When colored liquid was poured from a taller cylinder to a shorter wider cylinder, they thought the volume of liquid had decreased. These primary school children were using only the height of the container when making volume judgments and were hence making mistakes. Ah, you say, they are children and are naive enough not to understand that more th [...]