Did you know consumers spend $5.400 per year on average on impulse purchases of food, clothing, household items, and shoes?

That shouldn’t be quite a surprise. In one way or another, everyone has experienced a sudden, often powerful, and persistent urge to buy something immediately. In most cases, this regards something we hadn’t planned for.

It could be that one time you visited your local grocery store and realized there had been a huge discount on your favorite Italian rice. Or that time you walked into a high-end jewelry shop and suddenly purchased that sparkling golden Swedish watch on the shelf, regardless of the financial risks involved.

Now that was our impulse buying urge in full effect.

So how can we trigger these inherent impulse buying desires that consumers already have to stimulate impulse purchases?

Ideas. They are the rocket fuel behind many of life’s best decisions. And some of the worst.

Whether you’re an entrepreneur in search of fruitful business avenues, a storyteller pondering on a thought-provoking new narrative, or just a tourist contemplating what new things to do for holiday. For many of these decisions, we tend to turn inside for answers. In a very real way, we’re internally brainstorming with ourselves, trying to wrap our hands around these pearls of wisdom we call ideas.

Initial ideas differ widely in their vividness and concreteness. We tend to love vivid ideas. The entrepreneur could suddenly connect the dots between a brand-new technology and a target market that has a need that just screams to be met. The writer can conjure entire plotlines out of thin air in a matter of seconds, beginning, middle and end. And the tourist may suddenly decide to go bungee jumping in the crater of a sleeping volcano – I know I did.

But do these sudden crystal-clear notions always provide the best path to go forward? You may be able to think of some of your own initially brilliant ideas that turned out to be lukewarm at best – I know I do.

And what about those other ideas that were not fully crystalized yet, causing you to throw them out of the window? Of course, the million-dollar question is: how many of those prematurely discarded ideas would have turned out to be brilliant?

Countless of studies have been done on how individuals evaluate the creativity of their final ideas. But the psychology behind how we evaluate and build upon the initial figments of those ideas during the creative process itself has rarely been studied.

Price comparison is key to consumer buying decisions. Does price presentation predict purchase choice? A 2019 American Marketing Association study published by David Hardisty, Dale Griffin, and Thomas Allard confirmed the critical impact of price comparison framing on consumer marketplace decisions.

Research results demonstrate that consumers consistently chose a more expensive product among their options when the price difference was emphasized rather than the actual item price. Four individual studies confirmed this conclusion when measuring the impact of price framing on customer choices.

Most likely, you'll recognize that vague feeling when talking to a customer support chat service, that the "person" you're chatting with might actually be a computer. 

Indeed, the market size of chatbots is expanding: starting at $250 million in 2017, it will be more than $1.34 billion in 2024 (Pise, 2018). A chatbot is an automated speech generator that can respond to both written and auditory text. More than 21% of US adults and even more than 80% of generation Z (born between 1996 and 2010) use voice/text bots for information search and shopping.

The rise of social media has made watching television more fun and interactive. We get regular status updates from our friends who are commenting and sharing the latest trends and their opinions on current TV shows (not to forget about the endless amount of hashtags and tweets giving us live updates on current developments as the show proceeds).

On top of this, it seems as if the sudden rise of niche influencers has radically increased the volume of online chatter. These recent developments seem to have kickstarted a new multi-screen phenomenon, otherwise known as “social TV”, which is the joint viewing of TV shows alongside the consumption of program-related social media chatter.

This rapid growth of social TV has raised numerous questions for today’s advertisers: How can shows with a high volume of social TV activity, so called “social shows,” benefit today’s advertisers in this age of a multitasking TV audience?