The illusion of progress lights a fire
mindhacks.com
mindhacks.com
According to the owners, moving the 'free' car wash to be immediately available rather than at the end of the voucher book say a significant increase in people who bought them - even though ultimately it made no difference financially to the customers.
Grouping focuses people on immediate completion (visually completing a line or block) and keeping the relevant numbers small (3 and 4 instead of 12), even if the groups have no nominal significance.
For example, in a 4x3 card, maybe each row of 3 gets you 15% off if redeemed early. In this way, you're always close to something with provable value; you're more likely to value/carry/protect the partially-completed card; but you're also still likely to go for the 12-for-100%-off rather than stopping at 3-for-15% / 6-for-30% / 9-for-45% off.
(The various App punchcards bring the possibility of running many more incremental tests in this area, and novelties like 'awakening' dormant customers with a gifted stamp or two.)
Extract: "This research documents a phenomenon we call the endowed progress effect whereby people provided with artificial advancement towards a goal exhibit greater persistence towards reaching the goal. By converting a task requiring eight steps into a task requiring 10 steps, but with two steps already complete, the task is reframed as one that has been undertaken and incomplete rather than not yet begun. This increases the likelihood of task completion and decreases completion time. The effect appears to depend on perceptions of task completion rather than a desire to avoid wasting the endowed progress. Moderators include the reason, if any, offered for the endowment, and the currency in which progress is recorded."
PDF is available here: https://marketing.wharton.upenn.edu/files/?whdmsaction=publi...
I took a grad level marketing class as an undergrad in my time at my university and remember my professor mentioning this very same paper. Always found it fascinating, and at the time I was working at a bakery part time as well. Pitched the idea to them, they implemented, but the gains were marginal. Although, I suspect because business went down simultaneously during that period that no gain or no noticeable change could be seen as something of a positive, because everything else was in decline. So, yeah, I guess you would say it has real world application.
its also a really easy to demonstrate idea. I bring it up every time i encounter a loyalty card, just because I find it so damn interesting and remember the exact moment that my professor told us about this, eye opening example.
You might also gain some actual loyalty if you give them the last one for free, since that would be an unexpected treat reserved for people who bought 9 cups of coffee.
Hacking yourself to run at maximum might be maladaptive (like coffee), unless you are aware of and manage the downsides.
Add to this that there can always be more pieces of cheese to find, and always running from one to the next one could not be your best course of action.
For any kind of interaction which may be repeated then it just makes you look like a stupid business owner or software developer who can't properly estimate how long something will take!
I am still ambivalent about that, though.
According to a 1989 Newsweek article: The waiting times posted by each attraction are generously overestimated, so that one comes away mysteriously grateful for having hung around 20 minutes for a 58-second twirl in the Alice in Wonderland teacups.
Source: http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/37703/21793670...
Then I realized how foolish I was to buy anything other than the smallest size since I would have made the same progress for far less money.
Was just meaning there has to be a limit to how far this kind of thing can be pushed without getting downright dodgy in and of itself, and outright psychological manipulation for profit can reach a level where it is really not much better than theft.
I don't think that adding a couple of stamps to a loyalty card is particularly bad, and was just joking to make a point, but the pathological obsessiveness of modern marketing and the way that it can feed back into a mindset of treating your customers as punters or even prey, is something that I think is pretty destructive in our current culture.
[edit] I just realised the above is readable either way. I was meaning that I don't think that the shop adding a couple of extra stamps is really that bad. Obviously adding them yourself is nicking coffee and is only remotely acceptable when either dying of thirst, or possibly when visiting starbucks. :)
It's not unethical to try to influence someone, even subconsciously, even by the choice of arbitrary design elements ("you start with 2 of 12 checked") -- as long as there's no deception. Introducing deception crosses the ethical line. So faking a purchase that was never made to gain a benefit is unethical.
Perhaps there's a bit of grayness in that the 2/12 stamps makes people prone to underestimate the magnitude of the remaining effort ("5/6ths remaining") compared to an absolute measure ("10 of 10 purchases remaining"). But without there being a misrepresentation -- for example, a claim that the first 2 stamps are a special favor not usually granted -- all info for a proper evaluation is available and truthful. And it's even possible that such an influence is to the consumer's net benefit: maybe there's another cognitive bias against completely-unstarted efforts, causing people to overestimate effort required and never get started on things they'd actually enjoy. In any case, once the alternatives start requiring discussion or even controlled study to evaluate, it's harder to apply a stark label like 'unethical'. That label is more useful on easier-to-evaluate actions like prima facia deception.
(Still, the point is well taken that these are some sort of continuum, and it might be the case that a certain superficially-truthful offering is so likely to be misinterpreted by an average reader/listener that it is still de facto deception. I don't think the reward-stamps case is anywhere near that line... but carefully-wordsmithed political ads, designed to create false impressions without being blatantly falsifiable, often go right up to and over the line.)
In the simple case this is usually true, but I do wonder when you start throwing millions of dollars at researching exactly this sort of influence and start looking at pavlovian trigger mechanisms and stuff like that.
Most people aren't trained confidence tricksters, stage magicians or professional psychologists, but modern marketing at its most sophisticated is the combination of all three, backed with vast wealth and global reach, and it has already long gone beyond any pretence of acting as a way of informing people of things they might like to buy and has instead attempted, with a lot of success, to become the product itself. And, in case anyone was in doubt, I do not entirely regard this as a good thing.
I feel your statement is too pat. Why is that not unethical? Based on what ethical pattern?
If the basis of ethics is being truthful, it would seem that ease of understanding is also an important part of ethics. Subconscious manipulation and influence seems to be at odds with that goal.
Perhaps such manipulations is inevitable in a marketplace where everyone engages in unethical mental manipulation, but that does not make it ethical.
Note that these same sorts of perceptual influences are also the basis for all the do-gooder initiatives that get proposed by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein in Nudge. (So in fact I would grant there is at least one more dimension beyond deception: is the influence clearly against someone's interest? But there should be no presumption that whatever they would have done without the influence was the purest expression of their interests.)
Part of my ethical criteria is: what rules work? Part of 'work' is that they are evaluable. An accusation of undue influence, even though every observable aspect of a communication is true and fully disclosed, is very hard to evaluate. It's not very useful as a rule for deciding what one can do, or for assessing 'guilt' after the fact.
Using a bit of communication that is false on its face is easy to evaluate. It's fraud, and it's clearly unethical.
'Manipulation' is a loaded term. It just means "influence we don't like". In a commercial setting, reasonable people already assume a seller is crafting their communication to increase sales. Calling cleverly-crafted commercial influence 'unethical manipulation', even when it remains true in all observable aspects, overloads and dilutes the idea of what's ethical.
Is A/B testing that results in color, wording, and layout changes that increase sales 'unethical manipulation'? Perhaps if it goes so far, in total effect, as to create a tangibly false idea in the customer's minds. But not simply because it incrementally nudges someone towards a purchase.