Los datos del precio y cómo opera su psicología en nosotros.

The role of gifts in commerce dates back at least to ancient Rome. The poet Catullus described the gifts Caesar deployed to cajole and manipulate others as “wicked generosity.”

In recent decades, social psychologists have helped turn consumer-focused gift-giving into a science. One of the godfathers of this field is Robert Cialdini. Early in his career, in the 1970s, he became intrigued by the various tactics that salespeople used to get consumers to buy stuff. He set out to explore whether these tricks actually worked. He went undercover, taking sales and marketing jobs at a used-car lot, a fund-raising organization, a telemarketing company. He cataloged the tactics he witnessed and began to test them at Arizona State University, where he was a faculty member.

This work culminated in 1984 with Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, which became a best seller and is still assigned and read in business schools today. The book lays out six principles that can make a pitch more persuasive. Among them is reciprocity, which Cialdini’s book helped package as an explicit—and easy-to-implement—tactic for marketers.

More recent research has highlighted just how good an investment gifts can be—no matter what you’re selling. In one experiment, the economist Armin Falk had a charity send about 10,000 letters to potential donors, asking them to give money. About a third of the would-be donors received only a letter. Another third received the letter accompanied by a postcard with a colorful drawing on it—a gift, the recipients were told, “from the children of Dhaka” that could be “kept or given to others.” The final third received the letter and four postcards.

The postcards were not much of a gift—they cost pennies apiece. But they led to dramatically higher response rates. One postcard increased the response rate by 17 percent; four postcards raised the rate by 75 percent. According to Falk’s back-of-the-envelope calculation, the four-postcard solicitation improved the profitability of the direct-mail campaign by about 55 percent relative to the no-postcard solicitation (after accounting for the cost of the postcards themselves).

Other fund-raising experiments leveraging reciprocity have seen similarly impressive results. In a study conducted by Michael Sanders of the Behavioural Insights Team—Britain’s “Nudge Unit,” dedicated to using behavioral insights to improve government policy—investment bankers were asked to donate a day’s salary (roughly $750) to be split between two charities. Some were given a small packet of candy. The gift increased the likelihood of a full donation from 4.4 percent to roughly 11 percent—yielding a return on investment of more than 1,000 percent. (Like postcards, candy is cheap.) Clearly, even small gifts can have an outsize impact.

It’s a ten-step program that guarantees transforming a local rapper or minor celebrity into a meme and then a viral sensation using a set of proven marketing tricks. It includes tactics like: social-media influencer campaigns, meme-ing the artist, Musical.ly placements, World Star promotions, and something called “controversy projects,” which seems to mean planting feuds between artists and igniting drama to stoke controversy and online attention.

via Tumblr

Create Beautiful Forms, Fast

What if, at the point of purchase, you had the option to only buy what you wanted, for the time frame you specified? This type of consumer power is the reality for netizens in China today—because Chinese internet companies have adopted business models that are drastically different than what we see here in the States, especially on mobile.