Images that make people want to spend money

images that make people want to spend money

The question is which words actually make people want to swipe their credit cards. We are, however, interested in the psychology behind communication, and how we can be clever with our use of words. Naturally, that interest extends into curiosity about the words that make people spend money. The language you use to promote your brand has a direct impact on sales, namely because words drive consumer interactions with your company. From direct conversations with sales reps to casual encounters with social posts, the way you deliver messages has a significant impact on buying decisions. Word associations and connotations are partly responsible for such influence. Using an insulting, negative or easily-misinterpreted phrase can turn someone off a brand entirely, while the right conversation can have audiences clinging to every phrase.

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The tools companies employ to get you to buy their stuff have grown ever more sophisticated, with marketers even using neural measurements to design product packaging and appeal to your deepest desires to be covered in Cheetos dust , apparently. Research determines the ads you see, the scents and sounds you encounter in stores, even the way a salesperson might casually touch your arm. They make you nostalgic. Don Draper was on to something with his sentimental pitch for a Kodak campaign. But the abundance of families, puppies, and childhood ephemera in the ads you see every day is more than a simple ploy to tug on your heartstrings. Recent research shows nostalgia makes people value money less and feel willing to pay more for purchases. They sic rude salespeople on you. At high-end stores like Gucci, customers are actually more inclined to buy expensive products after a salesperson has acted snottily to them, a new study found. They use smaller packaging to get you to buy bigger. But research shows buying multi-packs of those small sizes can actually lead people to consume more overall.

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They get you lost and confused. Losing focus makes people spend more on impulse purchases, says expert Martin Lindstrom, who has conducted studies on marketing strategies. Getting interrupted during shopping also makes you less price-sensitive , according to research co-authored by marketing professor Wendy Liu at UC San Diego. They mimic your gestures—and get women to touch you. Additionally, research shows that if a salesperson of either sex imitates your gesticulations , you are more likely to buy what he or she is selling. They get you to handle the merchandise. And other research shows your willingness to pay more increases as you spend more time looking at and holding objects. They create the illusion of bulk bargains.

images that make people want to spend money

They constantly change the location of products

Sure, advertisers manipulate our habits, but our brains go with it, because deep down, we have a desire to consume. There are a few natural impulses that make us want to spend more. The book says there are three main impulses that urge us to consume. They point to a study, published in American Economic Review , that found people are willing to pay more for something when it is physically present in front of them. And the difference is pretty substantial. They showed another group a bag of potato chips right in front of them, asking the same question.

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However, while they might work well for hobbyists, free themes are not ideal for businesses for three reasons:. Perhaps this is better for economies, where it could be beneficial if people spend their money more freely, and many governments around the world are trying to encourage. For example, if children have a lot less than their wsnt they may feel depressed and may be tempted to steal. Premium Managed WordPress Hosting. The great ability of credit cards, in other words, is that they wield the psychological power of separating the pleasure of buying from the pain of paying. Even a small amount can give a child the feeling of responsibility and independence. After all, the design of your website directly affects the behavior of your visitors, and making your website more visually pleasing and easier to use can have a drastic impact on your bottom line.

1. Find common ground

I have a memory as a boy, saving my pocket money by placing it in a special drawer, the golden pound coins collecting into a neat stack. Although the stack never got too high images that make people want to spend money endanger its structural integrity. I grew up in Hastings, a small coastal town in East Sussex, famous for and seaside charm.

I got my first debit card when I was Later, I saved up money for a gap year, by working at a bingo hall, and I put the money into a savings account. I avoided credit cards. Skip forward to and I was living and working in Beijing, China, as a freelance journalist. All around me Beijing residents were paying for everything using just their smartphones. They would walk up to a counter of a restaurant, shop, or convenience store, and offer up a QR code for the cashier to scan. No fumbling for cash and waiting for change.

No swipe of a plastic card. The transaction would take seconds. But I was a stubborn holdout. But there were a couple of reasons why I kept using physical money and avoided getting into e-payments and e-wallets. Firstly, it felt safer. Having physical cash just felt safer. Secondly, I feared that by moving to electronic payments, and losing the greater friction of paying with cash, I would end up spending.

I was afraid that by losing the tangible, visible qualities of paper money, and the physical transaction — of fishing out my wallet, finding the required bills, and handing over the cash — I would lose all sense of how much, day by day, I would be spending. Were these fears justified? As more and more people across the world shun cash, these are essential issues to consider. Money is an abstract concept — and today we take it for granted, not considering how a piece of paper, or pieces of metal, are valuable items in themselves.

But money is a relatively recent invention, and it represented a fundamental change in human society, says Natacha Postel-Vinay, who teaches a course in the history of money and finance at the London School of Economics. You just needed some silver. In technical terms, money is a store of value, and should be a unit of account, which simply means that it must be of a standardized unit like a currency. The first recorded use of money was in ancient Iraq and Syria, in the Babylon civilisation, around BC.

In Babylonian times people used chunks of silver which were accounted according to a standardised weight known as a shekel. From Babylon, we have records of the first prices, recorded by priests at the Temple of Marduk, as well as the first ledgers and the first debts. From Babylon we have many of the essential things required for a monetary economy. These include the fact the silver was regularly tested for its fineness and there was a stabilising force, such as a King or government, which people could trust to guarantee the value of the money.

But there have been many developments in money along the way. From about BC other civilisations were using precious metal, and in ancient Greece, in the Kingdom of Lydia, the first coins were minted. Nowadays, money is not tied to physical objects that are in themselves valuable commodities, such as gold or silver coins, but we use a form called fiat money which is a currency that a government has established as legal tender.

The concept of credit and debt existed long before credit cards were invented. Subsequently, credit cards were promoted to travelling salesmen, for them to use while on the road, in America. The first debit card appeared in the UK in Chip and pin was introduced inand contactless credit cards followed four years later.

In China, meanwhile, scanning QR codes with your smartphoneor generating QR codes on your smartphone to be scanned by merchants, was co-opted as a means of making payments. From aroundadoption of e-payments in day-to-day usage became much more prevalent. Countries that have the highest rates of cashless spending include Canadawhere having more than two credits cards per person is a norm. Emelie Svensson, a Swede who works in New York City as a broadcast journalist, says the two countries are very different when it comes to the use of cash.

And although the UK might be increasing in its use of non-cash payments, it still has a long way to go. For Moa Carlsson, a year-old butcher from Gothenburg, the country feels quaint in comparison to her native Sweden. I would almost feel strange not to use cash. For people who live in these increasingly cashless societies, the benefits of electronic payment are obvious. Like Carlsson, he says dealing in cash feels antiquated. Does spending without using physical cash make people spend more?

This is a complicated question and it involves seeing humans as fundamentally irrational creatures, in various ways. In other words, the pain of the loss stings more, even though the two sums are exactly the. This kind of psychological insight has powered enormous change in the field of economics. Whereas before, in classical economics, academics based their theories on the assumption that people behave rationally so that the loss and gain of an equal sum would be treated the same by an individualthis was shown to be false by psychological studies.

This led to the discipline of behavioural economics and branches such as consumer psychology. One of the great researchers in this relatively new discipline is Drazen Prelec. The MIT professor once conducted a study that involved a silent auction. The auction was held for students at the prestigious Sloan business school, for tickets to sold-out NBA basketball games. The researchers told half the bidders they could pay only with cash, while the other half were told they could pay only with a credit card.

The results astonished the researchers. On average, it was found that the credit card buyers were bidding more than twice as much as the cash buyers. What this means, according to Prelec, is that the psychological cost of spending a dollar on a credit card is only 50 cents. Spending on a credit card clearly has effects on how people spend, which numerous studies have borne.

So much so, in fact, that behavioural economists believe this explains the continuing popularity of debit cards. But what about using e-wallets? With credit cards, the pain of payment is delayed until that monthly bill arrives. The great ability of credit cards, in other words, is that they wield the psychological power of separating the pleasure of buying from the pain of paying. But with e-wallets, users can see that money is deducted immediately. This is instant feedback and so does not have the same effect as a credit card.

Although there is no similar research yet on paying with e-wallets, it could be hypothesised that the flinch moment could be missing when paying with a smartphone. But this needs more research. This pain of parting with our money can keep us from overspending, but the negative aspect is that it can rob us some of the joy in consuming.

Prepayment is another method, even when there is no financial advantage. Companies such as Club Med have latched onto this kind of psychology, where their resort guests buy plastic chips to use instead of cash. For me, I eventually transitioned to using e-payments in Beijing. It is like living in a world where you get all the benefits of spending, without the pain of paying. Perhaps this is better for economies, where it could be beneficial if people spend their money more freely, and many governments around the world are trying to encourage.

In other words, I might be feeling this uneasiness because I am imagining that I could be spending that money on other things instead. As more societies move from cash-based to cashless, the way we spend might change. But money will remain a governing force in the lives of humans. This article is part of our Weird West series. Back ina team at the University of British Columbia pointed out that psychology research contains a major flaw: much of it is based on samples entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic — or Weird — societies.

The researchers often assumed that their findings would be applicable to people. In this series, we dig into what this looks like in everyday life. What habits and ways of thinking are common in Weird societies that people living elsewhere in the world might find, well, weird?

And what does this tell us, not only about cultural differences, but about ourselves? You might also like: The greatest myth about money The secret codes of banknotes Bitcoin and the illusion of money But I was a stubborn holdout.

Just five years ago I paid my rent in cash! But what of the supposed disadvantages? Neural pathways light up almost like brief physical pain when we part with our money.

Weird West This article is part of our Weird West series. Read. Open share tools. Like us on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter. Follow us on Instagram. Sign up to our newsletter. Around the bbc.

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Below is a list of some of the most creative and frankly, impressive strategies stores use to make you overspend and run out of products faster. Read on to avoid getting tricked. Can’t find the trail mix even though you just picked some up a few weeks ago? Don’t be surprised.

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And it’s a tactic that other stores use as. Business Insider previously reported on how a one-click checkout process like on Amazon can encourage overspending. Because you don’t need to enter billing, shipping, or credit card information, there’s no immediate obstacle to buying whatever you want or need. That’s great if you’re in a rush — but not so great if you’re on a budget. Free shipping should be good for our wallets — after all, it means cutting the overall price of a purchase. Somewhat counterintuitively, «Most people would rather spend more money buying things they don’t need than pay for shipping costs,» money-saving expert Andrea Woroch previously told Business Insider in an email. ProPublica reports that the reason eye drops overflow your eyes is because drug companies make the standard drop larger than the human eye can hold at. In other words, you’re throwing money away every time you buy a bottle of eye drops because half the liquid is wasted. One studypublished in the Journal of Marketing, looked at customers’ habits over roughly 49 months at two major online retailers. In JanuaryGoogle debuted a new feature that would allow users to mute «reminder ads» on websites and in apps. Reminder ads are those advertisements for shoes — or any other product — that have been following you around online since you checked them out a few days ago. That means you may still be haunted by the ghost of those shoes you sort-of-wanted-but-didn’t-really-need — and depending on how much willpower you have, you may cave and buy .

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