Yo-Yo with Yin-Yang Cues

Statistically, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. That’s the defining principle of Big Data and predictive analytics—the use of data from the past to foretell what will happen next.
     But trends vacillate. An overdependence on the past resembles driving a car forward while spending most of your time looking in the rearview mirror. It’s bad for retailers and for our shoppers. There are circumstances in which we’d all benefit from the yin-yang philosophy of balancing cycles which is associated with Asian cultures.
     Researchers from New York University-Stern and Princeton University asked study participants to allocate $1,000 across a selection of stocks with varying past performance. The European-American participants were more likely than the Chinese participants to put the money into stocks which had previously shown uniform growth. The Chinese participants were more likely to invest in ambiguously-performing stocks, anticipating that a balance would lead to an uptick in the stock value for any prior underperformance.
     Next a twist: When another particular group of European-American participants were shown a yin-yang symbol prior to the stock allocation task, they put more into the ambiguously-performing portfolio than had their counterparts not shown the symbol. As I say, this was a particular group—Princeton University undergraduates, a population that had already been shown to have good familiarity with the cultural associations of the yin-yang symbol.
     The hint for you: To encourage your shoppers and yourself to break free of the fallacy of the rearview mirror, use cues which are associated with change and balance. It could be a yin-yang poster on the wall, but it also could be a financial advisor talking about how past performance is no guarantee of future performance or a menswear salesperson showing the shopper examples of tie widths from different years.
     Another effective technique is to remind the customer of the variety of experiences they’ve had when shopping in your store. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, University of Minnesota, and New York University say the reason this works is that we often forget all of the variety we’ve actually had in our lives and instead focus on how repetitive our experiences have been. By reminding the customer of prior buying trips or asking the customer if there have been prior buying trips, we generate a sensitivity to the variety of experiences and the frequency with which that variety is the result of yin-yang cycles.

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