Current Topic: Strategy

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.

When in Italy, my father-in-law has a proven technique for finding the best wine in the supermarket: By checking which shelf is the emptiest, he knows which wine is being drunk by the locals and thus is the best to get at that moment. In other words, he gladly uses the scarcity principle when being confronted with many choices in a fairly new and uncertain environment.

We live in a returns culture, where delivery is free and so are the returns. Zero shipping fees and favorable in-store return policies make it very attractive to bulk buy products consumers don’t need. When consumers return their purchases, it causes losses for the companies due to extra logistical and repackaging costs. An increasing amount of returns have a negative impact on the environment too.

Marketers should strive to reduce the returns to save costs and reduce the adverse footprint on the environment. A recently published study has discovered a simple yet highly effective technique companies can use in this regard.

Going to a liquor store or standing in front of a shelf in the supermarket might sometimes be a little overwhelming. All products are screaming for your attention and it might be hard to pick the right product from the different designs and product sizes.