November
27
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Why We Buy: An Infographic
Before waiting in line, tackling the crowds, and opening up your wallet this holiday weekend, mentally prepare yourself for the shopping frenzy of Black Friday by exploring the neuroscience behind why we buy.
NeuWrite San Diego 
Great infographic but I’m still waiting for anything consistent to come from the flurry of interest in neuromarketing, which fails to produce substantive behavioral effects. In addition, studies on people’s judgments of wine quality are quite specific to wine–a lot of people argue that wine actually just doesn’t have that much differentiation, and when a product does have a larger quality range, people are still sensitive to that. Domain specific knowledge (which most consumers have when making a very large purchase, like electronics) washes these effects out, too. Do you think most of these effects occur in a grey area, when a consumer has very little other evidence to draw on when making a purchase?
All in all, I think one has to be really careful when talking about economic behaviors. It’s easy to write explanations from a hindsight position of critiquing unnecessary consumption at Black Friday, but there’s also a lot of evidence that people often DON’T purchases goods and resources that they need (think about the medical world), so these effects seem to apply to very limited circumstances, too. How would these effects impact our judgments about goods and services where an objectively valid and consistent price doesn’t exist, and the price is very malleable and difficult to determine?
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