Stumbling on Happiness is a fantastic book on Psychology that discusses some interesting phenomena in human behavior that effect our pursuit of happiness. The author, Daniel Gilbert, previously wrote fiction before becoming a professor at Harvard. I picked out a few marketing implications from the book. We tend to think of money in relative terms. [...]
Like Dave Barry said in the below quote, the commercialization of Christmas has partly distracted people from the true meaning of Christmas. You can’t escape the constant advertisements of sales by every retailer trying to leverage Christmas to help their bottom line. The other side of the argument would say that marketing is just facilitating [...]
It would seem logical that people would choose happiness over status but many consumers choose the latter. According to Dacher Keltner, Psychology professor at Berkeley, the data across studies show that once people have made it to the middle class, there is a very small correlation between money and happiness (he states a correlation of [...]
The study of Psychology can really help marketers understand customers. I recommend two tremendous courses available for free on iTunesU, which offers many free lectures. I have been listening to Psychology 156- Human Emotion and Psychology 160- Social Psychology at UC Berkeley, two very relevant courses to marketing. Both lectures are by Dacher Keltner , [...]
Featuritis can occur when product designers add so many features that the product becomes overly complex and difficult to use. In this awesome video by the talented David Pogue, (see opening parody about tech support) he explains how simplicity sells. He describes Microsoft Word, which has many many features that no one ever uses compared [...]
