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

Before we get into the “business” of this article, if you have 3 minutes and 33 seconds to spare, we invite you to listen to Amy Winehouse’s version of the classic song Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? It’s a great track and we think you’ll enjoy it.  Just click on the picture below.  When you’re finished, return to the article and we’ll explain how it applies.

One of the Sentient Applied Choice Architecture principles is anchoring and adjustment –defined as the influence of an arbitrary number on subsequent judgments of quantity or value (Chapman & Johnson, 2002). In this principle, the value (or “anchor”) serves as a reference point for consumers, and they form their subsequent judgments on value based on this anchor. For example, research from Ariely, Loewenstein, and Prelec (2003) showed that participants who were asked to recall the last two digits of their social security number whose digits were high (e.g., 76) were willing to pay more for a bottle of wine than participants who recalled the last two digits of their social security number whose digits were low (e.g., 12).

Please click for Dr. Aaron Reid’s  “True Drivers of Consumer Behavior” at CEO Club Boston 2011 event.

Ever wonder what goes on in the mind of people who drink impulsively? Most recently, research on its neural mechanism presented preliminary evidence of how such behavior is governed by the dynamic interplay between the automatic and the consciously controlled systems. In a study conducted at Claremont Graduate University, researchers including Dr. Susan Ames studied brain responses of heavy drinkers (those who consumed over 15 drinks a week and demonstrated binge drinking) and those of light drinkers, when these drinkers completed an Implicit Association Task involving alcohol related words paired with positive or neutral words.

A new article in the journal of Judgment & Decision Making has demonstrated that consumer preference for packaged goods can form in as little as 300 milliseconds. Furthermore, these third-of-a-second preferences correspond with preferences formed through lengthy deliberation up to 95% of the time. These findings have profound implications for the importance of understanding automatic action by shoppers in the aisle, particularly when consumers are in a hot-state (see our talk about automatic action at Future M).

In the mid 1500s the Polish cleric Nicholas Copernicus published a new model of the position of the sun and the planets in our solar system. In his view, the sun was more or less at the center of the solar system and the planets were assumed to orbit in epicycles. His theory was a major breakthrough in changing the Ptolemaic view that placed the earth at the center of the system. However, the view was also a major failure because Copernicus refused to give up the idea that the planets’ orbits were perfect circles. In order to account for the seemingly complex pattern of positions of the planets, Copernicus and his contemporaries had to work with many circular paths.