The endow­ment effect, sex in adver­tis­ing and pric­ing anchors: all bits of ‘shop­ping psy­chol­ogy’ we’ve heard before.

Ryan Sager looks at these shop­ping per­sua­sion tech­niques we should be aware of, adding a few small pieces of infor­ma­tion that may be novel:

  • Endow­ment effect: We place a higher value on items we own, and just by sim­ply tri­alling goods (try­ing on clothes, test­ing soft­ware, cars, etc.) we start to feel ownership.
  • Own­er­ship imagery: Feel­ings of own­er­ship (see above) can be induced by thought alone.
  • Roman­tic prim­ing: We (men, not women) increase spend­ing on items of con­spic­u­ous con­sump­tion when roman­ti­cally primed (i.e. induced to think about sex, men pur­chase items as a sig­nalling behaviour).
  • The ninety-nine pence/cent effect (psy­cho­log­i­cal pric­ing):

A recent study in the Jour­nal of Con­sumer Research found that when pens were priced at $1.99 and $4.00, only 18% of the par­tic­i­pants chose the higher-priced pen; but when the pens were priced at $2.00 and $3.99, 44% of the par­tic­i­pants selected the higher-priced pen.