The Place For My Writers Notes

one of the public channel shows had this information in it, and I thought it was interesting enough that I wrote it down. I'm not sure who might be interested though, so what the heck, I'll share with you and you can do whatever you want with it.

Okay, the first chunk of stuff concerned the concept of anchoring. Not your boat, this is mental anchoring. For example, apparently business people have found that there are several ways to show you that they are giving you a better price. You can simply say 30% off, you can list the discount price and then the old price, or you can list the old price and then the discount price. It turns out that showing you the high price first (the anchor) and then the discount price works best - people say "Oh, it's much cheaper." So the first thing we encounter is the anchor, used for comparison and a basis for thought.

Another example concerned an array of three shoes with slightly different prices. Which one should you put in the display window? Again, for retail purposes, put the high-priced item where the customer sees it first -- then the middle and low priced items will be seen as good buys.

They even had a very odd little experiment. People were given a chance to spin a roulette wheel with an array of values from 200 to 2000. Just for fun, while waiting. Then they were shown into another room, where someone asked them for a market survey to suggest a price for a pair of scissors. No apparent connection, but . . . with a large sample, they can show that people who spin 200 to 1000 end up suggesting an average price about 900, while those who get 1200 to 2000 propose a price about 1600.

So that's anchoring. The tendency for people to use a recent encounter as a comparison point or basis for decisions.

Now the next little bit of trivia concerned the old story of the ant and the grasshopper. Immediate or delayed gratification in more technical terms. Someone has done some brain imaging while asking people questions. The questions are rather simple. The first question is would you rather have $100 in one year or $110 in one year and one day? The second question is superficially similar, would you rather have $100 today or $110 tomorrow? However, brain imaging shows that these two questions are processed in very different parts of the brain.

They pointed out that this has to do with behavior in response to limited time sales. Buy it now apparently appeals to that grasshopper part of the brain, the immediate gratification processor, which tends to get engaged when we're excited and wants it now, not later! They also tied this into sales ads connected with sporting events - buy it now works best for those, since the customer is already excited.

Anchors and immediate gratification. Set the context for us to buy, and tell us it's only available for a limited time, only the first seven callers - and watch the phones ring!