Current Topic: Conversion

Imagine you’re spending the night in your nearby cinema, viewing Hollywood latest blockbuster. What determines how much you’ll enjoy the movie?

You might think about factors such the film’s beautiful cinematography, the popcorn’s crisp bite or even the usherette’s cute smile. Surprisingly, brain scientists from Princeton University have now unearthed a much more subtle influence on our experience of pleasure: the freedom of choice you had prior to attending the movie. The pleasure generated from choosing between options – let’s say a romantic comedy and a sci-fi epic – spills over to the subsequent experience. This is called the Choice Premium Effect.

People love routines. Of course, we like to think that we all make well-considered choices. But as a matter of fact, most of the time we are slaves to our own habits. This makes psychological sense, because why spend your precious time deliberating on your options and getting distracted by unnecessary details, if you can also apply a working recipe and go straight for the best result?

With neuromarketing, whether something is winning or losing conversions for you boils down to the absolute details. As specified in the overview article we recently published, some small changes can lead to big differences. Whether it’s a small change in pricing, the way you position your ads or the way you frame social proof, it all boils down to the details. And this new finding is no different than the others.

With our busy lives nowadays, we can’t always attend every meeting, birthday or SALE that we want to attend. So occasionally we miss out on deals and special offers; that’s life. But do we regret this, and more importantly, does this affect our decision-making?  

So people love free stuff. Always have, always will. Especially the Dutchies. We crave for free stuff, but that’s another discussion. But is free always the best option?

If you’re a marketer or entrepreneur and you tend to give away promotion products for free in order to generate more sales or bind customers: keep reading. All this time you have been doing it completely wrong.