What are the ideal characteristics for a person in a sales position? Great people skills? Strong product knowledge? Add confidence to the list. Continuing a discussion started in Convince With Confidence, there’s more evidence that the average person finds a confident demeanor persuasive, even when the confidence may mask a lower level of competence.
Review: The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us, by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons
Before reading farther, watch this video if you haven’t already seen it:
In a fascinating study just published in the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers have shown that we make buying decisions even when we aren’t paying attention to the products, and that fMRI observation of brain activity can predict these decisions. This new work builds on previous research by Stanford’s Knutson and CMU’s Loewenstein which showed that purchase decisions could be predicted when subjects were shown explicit offers. Here’s the abstract:
If you are human, you are subject to temptation. In a religious context, temptation is an invitation to sin, i.e., to break the established rules of that particular faith. Even without the influence of religion, society has both formal constraints (laws) and less formal ones (socially acceptable behavior) that seek to rein in temptation.
Ecommerce websites have a great opportunity to exploit the “scarcity effect,” primarily because they can often provide instantaneous feedback on inventory levels and, in a credible way, let customers know when products are scarce.
I don’t often get into neuro-parenting here, but I thought this particular research finding was interesting enough to single out. (I mentioned it in my Managing by Mistakes post last week, too.)
The short story is that a lot of what parents and teachers think about praising children and building self-esteem is dead wrong. Well-intended ego boosting can actually cause the child to perform more poorly in school. First, if you habitually praise your kids, you aren’t alone:
In a reply to my post, The Scarcity Effect, Neuromarketing reader Keith Monaghan pointed out how one bourbon marketing effort is employing scarcity to build its brand.
Management gurus have often suggested that failure should be rewarded (if the individual was trying something new), or at least not punished. We all know the problems that develop when employees become fearful and conservative – creativity is stifled, and performance suffers.
by: Roger Dooley
Banner ads may be the most common method of reaching consumers on the Web, but they don’t get much respect. Web marketers talk about “banner blindness,” implying that users become so used to the presence of these ads that they no longer even see them. I don’t think it’s time to write off the ubiquitous banner just yet, though. First, here are some comments on college banner ads from top marketing blogger Seth Godin:
by: Roger Dooley
Choking isn’t just for golfers and free-throw shooters. A particular kind of “choking,” thinking about the process of doing something instead of just doing it, can affect us all even when performing such mundane tasks as choosing a good-tasting fruit jam.