Advertising is based on eliciting emotions. Brands spend so much budget and effort trying to make you notice them, remember them, associate them with strong and powerful feelings. While the common mantra is “don’t sell the product, sell the solution”, for many companies this has manifested into selling a feeling. For example, look at this ad. 

From a very young age, most of us believe that the more choice - the better. While the benefits of some choice are absolutely clear, anecdotal evidence suggested long time ago that “too much” choice might be hurting people’s satisfaction, including product satisfaction, and hurting sales when it comes to businesses. Is that really the case? 

The law of demand states that conditional on all else being equal, as the price of a good goes up, the demand for it goes down and, conversely, as the price of a good goes down, the demand for it goes up. And logic dictates that’s exactly what should be happening. But of course it’s not (at least, not all the time).

The price of zero is not what it seems. It can make us shift our preferences, buy unnecessary products, and come back for them for a full price. Find out how and why. 

To understand the environment around us, we need information. Our brain seeks it all the time, desperately trying to make sense of every situation. Attempting to gather as much as possible and analyze the situation as quickly as possible, it makes our judgement prone to mistakes. Here we’ll explore these mistakes and draw some conclusions for marketers as well as other interested individuals.

Until recently, in terms of the history of science, it’s been assumed that people act generally rational when making decisions. Especially, if these decisions involve spending hard-earned money. It was believed by both economists and your neighbours (if they had ever been asked) that people make decisions based on their attitudes, that they reason their actions, that the rules of the market are based solemnly on supply and demand. Now we know it's the opposite.