How to Be a Better Shopper

Scientific American:

The other day an e-mail from Old Navy arrived in my in-box with the subject line “Buy one, get one 50 percent off all activewear. Two days only!” I get these sales e-mails from the store almost weekly, and even though I know exactly what the marketers are doing (trying to get me to spend money I wasn’t planning to spend), I usually click—and often end up purchasing—anyway. As a mortgage-owing, self-employed mom with two college funds and a retirement account to think about, I havegot to become a smarter, better shopper. You, too? Here’s how consumer psychology and marketing researchers suggest we start.

#1 Know that scarcity can sway you—big time. That Old Navy e-mail used a really compelling tactic by highlighting the limited time parameters of the sale—it introduced the idea of scarcity into readers’ minds and implied that we could miss out. “Scarcity is very primal,” says Kelly Goldsmith, assistant professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. “When people see the world as running out of anything, the research shows it makes them crazy selfish—it starts to explain things like Black Friday violence.” If something’s scarce, our minds tell us it is valuable and we need to snap it up. Even if we really, truly don’t.

Read the whole story: Scientific American