choice

Is the Butterfly Effect the antidote to the Broken Windows Theory?

Last week, I wrote about the Broken Windows Theory; in effect, it means that an environment that is not maintained (hence, filled with minor crimes, like broken windows) sends a signal that it is not monitored, which, in turn, leads to the occurrence of larger offenses or issues because no one is watching.

If you have an ecommerce site, how often do customers visit – often after a costly paid click – and end up leaving without buying? Are abandoned shopping carts all too common? Or, if your customers visit your retail store, how often do you see them compare several items, only to buy none of them and move on? If you stock similar items (and who doesn’t?), the problem could be your pricing.

Your brain gets tired, and one fatiguing activity is making choices. Various studies show that as people make more decisions, their subsequent decisions are rushed or they don’t decide at all.

My husband, usually a calm, mild-mannered man, recently experienced something which left him completely frazzled and frustrated – he went to the grocery store.

It happens every time. The moment those E.D. drug commercials list the possible side-effects: dry mouth, muscle weakness, nausea and, oh yes, erections lasting for more than four hours. I laugh out loud (or did the first hundred times I saw it).

On a recent, gorgeous day in New York City I walked from Bergdorf Goodman at 59th Street & 5th Avenue past Cartier on 52nd street and continued down 5th Avenue for over a mile. Because I was preparing for a speech I was scheduled to deliver to the Global Retail Marketing Association, I was paying particular attention to the stores and the shopping experiences they created — from the posh ambiance of Bergdorf’s with its $4,000 blue blazers to Diesel’s inexplicable ad line: “Smart has the brains, but stupid has the balls.”

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.

by: Will Lion

When options are very similar, people are more likely to leave a store empty-handed.

by: Joel Makower

I'm not sure whether it was strategic or serendipitous that the World Business Council on Sustainable Development released a report on sustainable consumption just a week before a recessionary Christmas — a time when countless millions were torn between the desire to shop and insufficient means to do so. Either way, it made for enhanced reading of what already was a pretty enlightening report.

by: Jonathan Salem Baskin

If there's a single lesson we brand marketers can learn from the world of politics, it might be that people make choices less because they like something, and more so because they dislike something else.