Should shopping carts be more like wheelbarrows? [marketing study]

Supermarket shopping carts (trolleys) tend to have horizontal handles – would people buy more things if the handles were parallel – like a wheelbarrow? New research from City University of London and the University of Innsbruck suggest that the answer could be ‘yes’. In an experimental study : “supermarket shoppers purchased more products and spent […]

Neuromarketing for dogs

Developing successful products aimed at dogs might not always be as straightforward as it may seem : “Because dogs cannot speak, traditional behavioral methods may be inadequate to reveal what dogs like or dislike.” But, according to the website of Dog Star Technologies LLC, newly developed methods involving fMRI scanning (combined with machine-learning algorithms) might […]

Interview with personality-of-rocks Ig Nobel Prize winner Shelagh Ferguson

The 2016 Ig Nobel Prize for economics was awarded to Mark Avis, Sarah Forbes, and Shelagh Ferguson, for assessing the perceived personalities of rocks, from a sales and marketing perspective. They documented their research in the study “The Brand Personality of Rocks: A Critical Evaluation of a Brand Personality Scale,” Mark Avis, Sarah Forbes, and Shelagh […]

Assessing the Perceived Personalities of Rocks

Of these three rocks, which would you say is the most ‘confident’ ? How about the most ‘sincere’ or ‘intelligent’? Just such questions were asked in a recent study by Dr. Mark Avis (Massey University, New Zealand), Dr. Sarah Forbes (University of Birmingham, UK) and Dr. Shelagh Ferguson (University of Otago, New Zealand). Their study […]

Marketing consultant’s study pleases his horse-promotion client

The German Equestrian Federation [Fédération Equestre Nationale, also known as “FN”], announces that it commissioned a study from a marketing consultant — as to whether horseriding promotes character development (in people). The FN indicates that it is pleased with the results. Here is a rough, machine-produced translation of the announcement: Riding promotes character development FN new trial Warendorf […]

McGraw & Warren, humor zeroing

Marketing researchers zero in, ever further, on understanding how people react to theoretically humorous stimuli. Investigator Dan Goldstein alerts us to a new study which says: [In one experiment] participants read one of two versions of a scenario adapted from Haidt et al. (1993) as part of an ostensibly unrelated experiment. Participants either read about […]