is Useful

Tag: psychology

  • "Priced to sell at 9.99!"

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    Matt
    in

    Shops have always delighted in setting prices slightly below the full amount of a dollar or pound, and whether it’s 9.99 or 9.95 us consumers still feel it’s much better value. A new study has shown that this 1p or 5p saving still gets us by the purse strings, with a 15% increase in sales…

  • 10 Ways to Make a Book Popular

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    Matt
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    The UK’s premier yearly book awards, the Man Booker prize, has just been won by the rank outsider Anne Enright, for her book ‘The Gathering’. The Booker prize has a habit of being un-predictable, and it certainly isn’t a popularity contest, but winning the prize is a boon to any novelist’s sales. To help the…

  • Influencing Advertising

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    Matt
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    Derren Brown is a well known British illusionist, who often specialises in ‘tricks’ where he influences his randomly chosen helpers to do exactly what he wants them to do. In the video below Derren influences some advertising folks, as well as showing us how he did it – it’s fascinating watching and makes you realise…

  • Hide In Plain Sight

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    Matt
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    Glasgow has decided to take on illegal fly-posting in a new way. Instead of scrapping off the posters from every inch of space they take up, a time consuming and messy process, they are simply sticking ‘cancelled’ notices of their own over gig posters! Then the venue owners have to deal with hordes of irate…

  • Social Flow

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    Matt
    in ,

    I’ve been re-reading the excellent Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience again and I highly recommend you all do too. In it, author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes his research into how people get into ‘flow’ states, that is states of enjoyable activity where you immerse yourself completely in what you are doing and stay deeply focussed.…