A fun toy or a useful watch? How do people make purchasing decisions?

When you add your possible choices to a wish list, you are more likely to choose pleasure over utility, writes Amitav Chakravart

Hit-or-miss strategies may be the reason why products flop

Insight on consumer sentiment helps explain best sellers and market flops, writes Amitav Chakravart

Less branding and more health warnings can reduce tobacco use in the European Union

A large-scale survey of 8,000 European citizens across 10 EU member states tested participants’ responses to health warnings in cigarettes and found that removing or reducing product branding and increasing the size of health warnings made cigarette packets significantly less appealing. Amitav Chakravarti writes that combined warnings provide an economical way to reduce the effectiveness of tobacco industry marketing and can contribute to changes in social norms and behaviours

Less branding and more health warnings can reduce tobacco use in the European Union

A large-scale survey of 8,000 European citizens across 10 EU member states tested participants’ responses to health warnings in cigarettes and found that removing or reducing product branding and increasing the size of health warnings made cigarette packets significantly less appealing. Amitav Chakravarti writes that combined warnings provide an economical way to reduce the effectiveness of tobacco industry marketing and can contribute to changes in social norms and behaviours

Investors’ reactions to company advertisements: The persuasive effect of product-featuring ads

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Two-stage decisions increase preference for hedonic options

When choosing from multiple options, decision-makers may directly choose an option (single-stage decision), or initially shortlist a subset of options, and then choose an option from this shortlist (two-stage decision). Past work suggests that these two decision formats should lead to the same final choice when information about the choice alternatives is held constant. In contrast, this research demonstrates a novel effect: two-stage decisions increase preference for hedonic (vs. utilitarian) options. A regulatory focus account explains this effect. In a two-stage process, after shortlisting, decision-makers feel that they have sufficiently advanced their prevention goals, and this reduces their prevention focus during the final choice stage. Reduced prevention focus, in turn, enhances hedonic preference. Four studies across different decision contexts illustrate this effect and support the underlying process mechanism. The findings suggest that the formal structure of a decision (single-stage vs. two-stage) leads to systematic differences in decision-makers’ choices

Why people (don't) buy: the GO and STOP signals

Full of practical diagrams and maps, as well as international case studies, this book offers a unique and extensively-tested 'GO-STOP Signal Framework', which allows managers to better understand why consumers are not buying their products and what can be done to put this right

Pathos & ethos: emotions and willingness to pay for tobacco products

In this article we use data from a multi-country Randomized Control Trial study on the effect of anti-tobacco pictorial warnings on an individual’s emotions and behavior. By exploiting the exogenous variations of images as an instrument, we are able to identify the effect of emotional responses. We use a range of outcome variables, from cognitive (risk perception and depth of processing) to behavioural (willingness to buy and willingness to pay). Our findings suggest that the odds of buying a tobacco product can be reduced by 80% if the negative affect elicited by the images increases by one standard deviation. More importantly from a public policy perspective, not all emotions behave alike, as eliciting shame, anger, or distress proves more effective in reducing smoking than fear and disgust