Sentient Insight: the business blog for consumer psychology and consumer marketing

In today’s world we know that we consciously market ourselves in order to attain goals such as securing employment, meaningful social and romantic relationships, or the dissemination of our ideas. In fact, we are in a constant state of marketing what we have to offer to social groups, family, friends and potential mates. With this insight, we might define the origin of marketing as the point in time when humans began to interact within markets for ideas or other social currency. But personal marketing didn’t begin with the human species. We need to look at our ancestors to begin to understand the true origin of marketing.

A fascinating new study on the factors influencing Hot-State Decision Making is showing that the traditional American diet of turkey on Thanksgiving Day might actually be reducing purchase behavior on the best sales day of the year. Mishra & Mishra (2010) hypothesized that the consumption of tryptophan would reduce subsequent impulsive behavior. Their hypothesis is based on evidence that the presence of serotonin in the human body reduces impulsive choice thereby stabilizing behavior (Cools et al. 2005; Manuck et al. 2003; Rogers et al. 2003).

In our recent paper on Hot State Decision-Making we discussed the perfect storm of providing consumers with immediate visceral delight while simultaneously providing emotional benefits relevant to long-term goals. This formula provides both short-term and long term benefit thereby maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain for your customer base. A recent article by Khan & Dhar (2010) in the Journal of Marketing Research shows an innovative method of delivering this perfect storm for your customers through careful framing of the discount on your bundled offerings (a bundle is an offer of a second item with the purchase of first item; usually a discount is offered when purchased together – think Amazon’s “better together” discounts).