Cigarette warning labels encourage smokers to light up, brain scientists say, as the part of the brain that creates cravings is stimulated by the sight of the warning. This nugget comes from Buy*ology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy, a book by Martin Lindstrom, based on a three-year-long neuromarketing study that measured brain activity in 2,000 volunteers worldwide. Apart from being an interesting "fact", this research provides another reason for retailers to watch shoppers closely. People frequently do not behave as you (or your suppliers) expect them to. Understanding how they behave will give you an edge, no matter how small.
“Twenty years ago I was driving boxes to the post office in my Chevy Blazer and dreaming of a forklift,” says Jeff Bezos in his most recent letter to shareholders. A blink later and he points out that the company has grown from 30,000 employees in 2010 to 230,000 now. But his ambition is the same. “We want to be a large company that’s also an invention machine. We want to combine the extraordinary customer-serving capabilities that are enabled by size with the speed of movement, nimbleness and risk-acceptance mentality that is normally associated with entrepreneurial start-ups.” Amazon is great at disruption because of its customers focus and the fact that the internet means it needs none (or very few) people between its warehouses and the shopper. The threat of Prime, its membership service, is the biggest challenge facing the UK retail market and the wholesale market by extension. It is both a direct threat and an indirect threat in that is inspiring countless numbers of othe...
Interesting, I found Why We Buy: The Science Of Shopping by Paco Underhill a facinating read. It covers a similar area of life from a different view point.
ReplyDeleteAnd of course John Stanley is quite inspirational. http://www.johnstanley.cc/