Offer Illusions Which Bring Pleasure

It was a summer while I was an undergraduate at UCLA that I first performed brain surgery.
     I wasn’t doing this solo. I worked under highly competent supervision. My surgery assignments were part of a neuropsychology honors program at the prestigious Brain Research Institute.
     I also should tell you that I performed the surgery not on people, but on laboratory rats.
     The purpose of the project was to explore what is called intracranial self-stimulation. I implanted small electrodes in pleasure centers of the brain. Then the rat could give itself a tiny electric pulse through the electrode by pressing a bar.
     What we found was that this direct stimulation of pleasure centers altered behavior without the need for traditional rat payoffs like food. The electric pulse was so rewarding that, in many cases, the rat had to be disconnected from the apparatus periodically. Otherwise, the animal would press itself to the point of collapse, never taking time to drink, eat, or sleep.
     Even if we don’t want our customers to shop until they drop, let’s stimulate the shopping pleasure centers. A recent CBS-TV “48 Hours” segment featured behavioral scientists describing an often overlooked truth about the stimulation: Since we won’t be literally hard-wired into the human shopper’s brain, as I’d done with the rats in the Brain Research Institute studies, pleasure is more strongly associated with what the consumer thinks they are experiencing than with what they are actually experiencing.
     Researchers at Stanford University asked people to taste five wines and to rate their quality. They also were told the costs of the wines—five prices which ranged from relatively inexpensive to relatively expensive. What the study participants did not know was that the five wines tasted actually came from only three different bottles. One pair was presented as two different wines, both at a $45 price point and at a $5 price point. This was also true for another pair of wines.
     Brain scans showed that when people were tasting the $45 wines, there was enhanced activity in an area of the brain associated with consumer decision making based on emotions. Compared to when a study participant tasted a wine identified as low priced, the participant tasting the identical wine identified as high priced experienced greater pleasure of the sort that translates into an increased likelihood of buying the wine.
     Offer to shoppers illusions which bring them pleasure.

Click below for more:
Moderate Discounts to Project Quality
Sell Benefits to Fit Shoppers' Values