How to Lead Your Customer Into Temptation.

PALO Alto (Calif.); CALIFORNIA

The article presents information on a study validating a new model of how consumers make decisions. For a 1999 research paper, Baba Shiv, then an assistant professor at the University of Iowa, told two groups of experimental subjects that they would be participating in a memory study. He asked the first group to memorize a two-digit number; the second group got a seven-digit one. Then, before the subjects were asked to recall the numbers, Shiv offered them a choice, a scrumptious piece of chocolate cake or a healthy bowl of fruit salad. Marketers tend to view consumer needs as monolithic. But now psychologists suggest that consumer decisions are really the outcome of an epic battle. On one side, they say, are primitive emotions such as desire and fear--known as "affective" urges. On the other are higher-order cognitive thoughts, such as "Cake is not healthy." Since that study, Shiv, now a marketing professor at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, has been using cake and fruit salad to explore different ways of getting consumers to yield to temptation. By asking subjects to memorize long numbers, Shiv increased the likelihood that they would choose an impulse item like cake over a more rational one like fruit salad.