Articles (page 26)

Assertive advertising reliably irritates people and barely moves them, and the gap between those two findings is the useful part. The best pooled estimate in advertising says both halves at once.

We carried the two-thirds figure for months, and it turns out to rest on one paywalled study of eighteen employees whose abstract never prints it. The number the record supports is half, and the…

Adding a dear flagship can make the model beside it the bestseller. On London wine lists, the fattest percentage margins sit in the mid-range, not on the second-cheapest bottle.

Cancelling takes more steps than joining because the extra steps earn money. In a randomised trial with more than two million newspaper readers, roughly half of those who took an auto-renewing trial…

In 2018 two consumer researchers argued that loss aversion had been accepted as a general rule without the evidence to back it. The most persuasive reply came from a five-cent charge on shopping…

A cube of cheese on a cocktail stick is a gift, and shoppers treat it like one. In a 1971 study an unasked-for Coke nearly doubled what people bought from the person who gave it.

A cliffhanger is said to keep you watching because unfinished business lodges in memory. The pull is genuine, and it comes from wanting to resume the story, which is a different mechanism with a…

Locking a gripping audiobook in a gym locker got students and staff exercising more often, and 61 per cent later paid to have the lock back. Which part does the work, the treat, the lock or the…

A humour column at Harvard Business School named FOMO in 2004, and psychologists turned it into a ten-item scale in 2013. Its route from there to the shop floor runs through four shopping studies…