What is your budget? What is your bid? How much would you like to donate?

These questions have become quite commonplace online; customers are asked to choose what they would like to pay, rather than are provided with a pre-set value. For instance, eBay allows customers to bid on listed items, whereas charity website Doctors Without Borders allows donors to enter a chosen donation amount.

Customers are prompted to indicate their chosen value either via an open-ended text box or a slider scale. With the recent boost in popularity of online transactions via mobile phones, organizations have increasingly turned to the use of slider scales rather than text boxes to register monetary values.

But how has this switch to sliders affected customers’ payments? Do payment responses differ for text boxes and slider scales? As it turns out; yes, they certainly do!

Deciding whether or not to put a product in your shopping basket is often a split-second decision. If there’s one advantage neuromarketing has over traditional methods, it’s being able to measure objectively what happens during that split second.

One problem: the amount of research methods under the ‘neuromarketing’ umbrella grows ever more diverse. From skin conductance to EEG. From Facial Coding to Eye Tracking.

When deciding for a specific method, a marketer wants to know one single thing: how well does it predict actual purchase?

Marketing and psychology are thick as thieves: by increasing their knowledge on psychology, marketeers are able to gain a deeper understanding in the behavior of their customers. However, keeping your knowledge up to date may be problematic in this quickly expanding field. In the past, people read books, scientific journals or attended conventions.

Ask yourself: when you want to buy a pair of shoes, what is the first thing you do?

Chances are, you’ll start browsing for your favourite colour, your favourite brand. You’ll choose a few models you like, maybe order them online. Or first go to the shop to try them on and then, maybe browse some more to find the best prices. And finally, you buy a pair of shoes.

For 87% of all shoppers, the buying process involves researching online before doing a purchase in a physical store.

The use of curiosity in marketing is nothing new. Every day, our curiosity is activated by teasers, advertisements, blog titles, and e-mails in our inbox. They evoke a motivational state to obtain missing information. We feel an irresistible urge to gain the missing knowledge. And…before you know it, you fell for it! You have watched the full video or clicked on that email to read its content. Your curious itch is scratched.

But that’s the problem. In order for this type of marketing to work, the consumer has to take that extra step to actually satisfy that curiosity. Although we experience an urge to close the gap between what we know and want to know, nowadays we are bombarded with click-baits and teasers. And the more it’s used, the less we fall for it.