Using Behavioral Economics, Psychology, and Neuroeconomics to Maximize Sales

adrianhoward 13 years ago |

If folk found this interesting I'd recommend they get hold of a copy of "Neuro Web Design: What Makes Them Click?" by Susan M. Weinschenk. It's not the most academic of books and a quick read (about 150 pages or so) - but it gives a bunch of high-level pointers to stuff that you can google around and dig into if you like.

allsop8184 13 years ago | |

Yeah - I've read that. EXCELLENT book. You can get it here... http://www.amazon.com/Neuro-Web-Design-Makes-Click/dp/032160... (No I didn't put an Amazon affiliate code at the end) ;)

James_Henry2 13 years ago | | |

Why? You don't like making free money?

allsop8184 13 years ago | | |

Who doesn't like free money? I just didn't want to come across like that was the only reason I was posting the link.

James_Henry2 13 years ago |

My favorite behavioral economist is Dan Ariely - his TED talk "Are we in control of our decisions" is really valuable to entrepreneurs. Link here: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_o...

dmix 13 years ago | |

There's also a good book called Subliminal that discusses the neuroscience of how our subconcious brain make decisions that we often believe we made ourselves.

http://www.amazon.com/Subliminal-Your-Unconscious-Rules-Beha...

plancien 13 years ago |

Nice article ! One comment : on the "Selling Time Over Money" part, it seems to me that some business manage to do the opposite. Take Ikea, for instance. Typically you buy some furniture there, hoping to spend little money in exchange of giving up your sunday afternoon precious time. If you take into account the time spent assembling the furniture, with a reasonable hourly rate, some furnitures there are not so cheap anymore.

The Ikea business implies that sometimes we prefer money over time.

allsop8184 13 years ago | |

That's a really good point, and I guess IKEA often uses their low prices in their advertising. Wal-Mart does the same.

mbesto 13 years ago |

I don't normally just make blanket comments for articles, but this article is spot on. Can't add much more to the conversation, other then, READ THIS.

dschiptsov 13 years ago |

These are so primitive and obvious manipulations, that most of target customers already evolved (learned by experience) to ignore them.

freshhawk 13 years ago | |

Got a source on that? My experience and the research disagree, these take advantage of lower level cognitive biases that are prevalent (or maybe universal) in human beings.

dschiptsov 13 years ago | | |

Lots of people have even a habit of identifying such tricks. Others, like me, have an automated tendency to map them to the list of cognitive biases from Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases - the thing that deserves to be printed and framed.

freshhawk 13 years ago | | |

I certainly have that same tendency, and have fun playing the "name that bias" game.

But we are both in a tiny minority and are still influenced by those biases even when we recognize them. I would argue we would be less influenced when we recognize them but that's conjecture on my part.