Behavioral Psychology on Research Tool

Why Being Interesting Isn't Enough: Emotional Triggers in Advertising

cahoover@gmail.com (Christopher Hoover) — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Imagine attending a cocktail party where you don’t know anyone. You engage in small talk, selecting topics strategically — mentioning books to appear intelligent, restaurants to seem cultured, or amusing anecdotes to be perceived as funny.

Advertisers want to be interesting too

Companies invest heavily in making products stand out through creative advertising — dancing food characters, sedans in car chases, and high-budget campaigns. While this approach can work, a product doesn’t have to seem interesting for a campaign to be effective.

Correlating impact advertising with effectiveness

Wharton professor Jonah Berger studied whether interesting product positioning correlates with campaign success. Working with word-of-mouth marketing firms, he measured consumer engagement across hundreds of products. His findings: he found no correlation. Interesting products didn’t receive any more word of mouth than everyday products.

Novelty showed the same result — no correlation with word-of-mouth engagement, regardless of demographic differences.

Context in advertising

Berger discovered two distinct campaign styles: “impact” advertising, which emphasizes unique qualities, and trigger-based campaigns, which associate products with specific contexts like activities or circumstances.

Context is everything

Research demonstrates context’s powerful influence on behavior:

Music genre affecting wine sales in stores
Increased space-themed product sales during Mars missions
Vote location (schools) influencing education initiative support

Marketing to context

Trigger campaigns build associations between emotional contexts and products over time. Three successful examples:

Corona linked beach relaxation to beer (8% market share growth)
Kit Kat connected coffee breaks to chocolate bars (5% growth)
Kodak created the “Kodak moment” for family gatherings

Three things that matter most for triggers

Frequency: Triggers must occur regularly. Michelob’s holiday campaign underperformed until reframed as “Weekends were made for Michelob.”

Strength: Ubiquitous or competing triggers dilute effectiveness.

Context: Triggers aligned with desired behavior outperform mismatched associations. A pediatrician’s office better suits immunization promotions than grocery carts.

For deeper research insights, explore Jonah Berger’s book Contagious: Why Things Catch On.

People follow 'expert' advice, even if it's bad

cahoover@gmail.com (Christopher Hoover) — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR: Our brains tend to shut down and blindly follow expert advice, even when the advice is bad.

A 2009 study published in the journal PLoS ONE provides interesting insights into how our brains react to so-called “expert” financial advice. The research, conducted by a team of neuroscientists and economists, used brain imaging techniques to peer inside people’s heads as they made financial decisions involving risk and uncertainty. In some cases, the participants had to rely on their own judgment. But in other trials, they were advised by a financial expert about what choice to make.

Here’s a link to the research: Expert financial advice neurobiologically “Offloads” financial decision-making

People tend to blindly follow experts

The result: When left to think for themselves, participant’s brains lit up in areas known to be involved in calculating value and weighing risks and rewards. But when expert advice was provided, these valuation regions went dark. Instead, the brain defaulted to areas involved in social cognition and theory of mind - in trying to figure out what the expert was thinking.

The presence of expert advice caused the participants to shut down their own independent value calculations and instead focus on uncritically following the expert opinion.

Essentially, the presence of expert advice caused the participants to shut down their own independent value calculations and instead focus on uncritically following the expert opinion. As the study authors put it, the expert advice “offloaded” the burden of financial decision-making from the individual’s brain.

The implication is that people may be prone to blindly follow expert advice without engaging in any rational analysis of their own. The normal brain mechanisms for evaluating risks, rewards, and probabilities get bypassed. We switch from objective valuation to trying to get inside the expert’s head.

Ignoring expert advice is stressful, even if it’s wrong

What happens if the expert’s advice is suboptimal or just plain wrong? The study found that regions involved in negative emotional arousal activated when people went against the expert’s advice. Rejecting an expert opinion appears to be stressful, unnatural, and aversive at a neural level. Our brains are wired to follow the experts.

There are dangers to this instinct to conform to expert advice. While experts in finance and other fields certainly have valuable knowledge to impart, they can also make mistakes and have biases or ulterior motives. Blindly adhering to expert opinion deprives us of the ability to think critically and form our own judgments. And if an expert’s advice is flawed, it could lead to harmful decisions, both at an individual and societal level, if followed en masse.

The larger the team, the less productive each individual becomes

cahoover@gmail.com (Christopher Hoover) — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Managing people can be rewarding. It can also be an absolute pain in the neck.

It’s messy, for one thing. People get into spats. Or they get into romantic entanglements that inevitably lead to spats. They get too drunk at the Christmas party. They complain and argue and are passive-aggressive. Or aggressive-aggressive.

These issues are tiresome, but they’re not the real challenge. The challenge is productivity. Getting teams to maintain a strong pace and achieve consistent quality is hard. I struggle constantly with it.

The nagging voice in my head assures me this is proof I’m a crap manager. I wouldn’t say I like that voice, but it’s motivating. It keeps me focused and engaged, and I am forever looking to improve. But the struggle is always there.

If you struggle like this as well, take heart. Lower productivity is a natural consequence of teams. The challenge is built in and largely unavoidable. The nagging voice may still be there, but it’s wrong.

People slack off if they’re in a group

This story starts, as so many great stories do, in France just before the First World War.

In 1913, a man named Eugene Tisserand worked in the French Ministry of Agriculture. Tisserand’s job was to look for ways to improve farm production, and he traveled all over France, visiting farms and talking to farmers. As he travels, he observes that most farming equipment is poorly designed and constructed by the farmers themselves.

Tisserand figures that a scientific approach might help improve production, so he commissions a Parisian professor named Maximilian Ringelmann to study farming processes and to establish best practices.

Ringelmann sets to work measuring the efficiency of farm equipment and the horses that drove them. Along the way, he discovers something odd. Two horses working together didn’t do twice the work of a single horse. Adding more horses decreased each horse’s contribution even further.

Ringelmann wondered if the same thing happened with people. To test it, he brought a group of students over to the farm lab. He asked them, individually and in groups, to pull a rope attached to a force meter. When two people pull together, they each apply about 90% of the effort than when they pull individually. If three people pull together, each contributes about 85% of their individual effort. And when eight people pull together, each applied only about 49%!

This is the Ringelmann effect, sometimes known more colloquially as “social loafing.”

Why people slack off

Since Ringelmann’s experiment, researchers have found the phenomenon in countless contexts. Swimmers competing in a relay race put in significantly less effort if they thought their individual times were not being measured. The same story goes for rowers, whose efforts systematically (and unconsciously) decrease as team size increases. Students working together on a joint project will each contribute less effort.

Unsurprisingly, the Ringelmann effect also occurs at work. Dozens of studies have shown that individuals reduce their effort when they are part of a workgroup. Team members contribute less frequently and with lower quality than when acting alone. This is true with any team at any level in the organization, including the board of directors, the executive team, or a clutch of interns. The transition to remote work has only amplified the effect.

“Dozens of studies have shown that individuals reduce their effort when they are part of a workgroup.”

Studies have also looked into why slacking occurs. There are many reasons, and a single team can have one or many of them:

Workgroup cohesion

Tight-knit teams foster a sense of loyalty and responsibility among members. Teams that lack interpersonal “chemistry” are less productive because it reduces the consequences of slacking — there’s little fear that by slacking you’re dropping the ball on a friend. Obviously, remote work makes building and maintaining team cohesion even more challenging.

Dispensability of effort

Sometimes, people feel intimidated or incompetent relative to other team members. There is a perceived risk of humiliation through contribution and a feeling that the team will complete its task at some minimal satisfactory level even without one’s contributions.

Futility of effort

The opposite side of the coin from dispensability of effort, feelings of futility cause a person to believe that the team’s mission will fail regardless of their contribution. Regardless of the extent or caliber of their contribution, the team will fail to meet its goal.

Lack of recognition

Individuals might feel that their supervisors can’t (or won’t) distinguish their work from contributions made by other team members. If there’s little visibility into an individual’s contribution, that person believes they will experience the same consequence whether they work hard or not. Given the choice, most people will opt for the latter and instead focus their efforts on more personally beneficial activities.

Unbalanced effort

If a person believes that other team members are contributing less, they may reduce their effort to better mirror the contribution made by others. In a remote setting, unbalanced effort becomes more pronounced, with some team members feeling they are contributing more due to the lack of visibility into everyone’s workloads, further complicating the dynamics of effort and contribution.

Unfairness

There is a strong relationship between productivity and the sense that a team’s procedures and processes are equitable among all members. If certain team members are perceived as favored, others will likely decrease their contributions to the team.

Workgroup size

Team size is the magnifier of all other effects of all the variables described above. As a group grows larger, it’s more difficult to distinguish and assess individual contributions. This increases the likelihood that individual members will feel anonymous and decrease their efforts accordingly.

All of these reasons are dynamic and recursive. For example, if a team member reduces their effort for any reason (say because they think the team is unfair), others will tend to react to this by likewise reducing their efforts, causing still others in the team to react, and so on.

This dynamic plays out at home, too. If one partner believes the other is better at housework, they may believe their effort is dispensable and reduce their effort toward maintaining the house. The other partner, meantime, begins to feel their effort is futile and likewise reduces housekeeping activities.

“The effectiveness of any group tends to decline over time, with each member putting in the least effort required.”

Some strategies

The (sort of) good news is that there are methods for limiting slacking on teams. The bad news is that it’s not easy — they all involve careful planning and ongoing engagement on the part of the manager.

Compose groups with different skill sets

This ensures each member feels their contribution is unique and essential to the team’s success. When forming teams, highlight each person’s strengths to reinforce their sense of value. This approach also helps broaden employees’ abilities by exposing them to new skills.

Limit group size

Teams become unwieldy to manage after a certain size, and become less and less productive anyway. The group should be large enough to accommodate members of various necessary skill sets, but not much larger.

Clarify goals and objectives

Teams need to feel that they understand what they are trying to accomplish, that the mission matters, and that it is achievable. Managers should work hard to clarify overall OKRs as well as those for each member.

Give groups discretion over planning and executing work

Ownership increases engagement, so set overall vision and objectives and allow the team to work out how to get there. Some managers will tell the team to figure out the details and then ignore the team until it’s time for the final delivery. Don’t do that. Have the team present the strategy, ensure it is measurable and realistic, and stay engaged.

Measure and stay engaged

Set clear expectations for each team member and track progress through regular one-on-one meetings. This ensures everyone feels recognized, allows you to address potential problems proactively, and ultimately prevents issues from escalating.

Beware geographic distribution

Remote work is a fact of the modern workplace, but it can contribute to lower productivity because it can be harder to maintain group cohesion. When building geographically distributed groups, you need to double down efforts to foster communication and engagement.

B2B customers aren't rational

cahoover@gmail.com (Christopher Hoover) — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The CMO council determined that most B2B marketing efforts are largely ineffective. Buyers and influencers characterize marketing as “self-serving, irrelevant, hyperbolic, and hyper-technical,” lacking the “depth, objectivity and strategic context” they need.

Research Foundation

In 1974, Purdue professor Jacob Jacoby studied how consumers process product label information. His finding was counterintuitive: increased packaging information actually decreased consumers’ likelihood of selecting products matching their initial preferences. This challenged the assumption that more information improves decision-making.

The Rational Choice Theory Problem

Traditional marketing relies on rational choice theory—the idea that people have clear preferences and make impartial decisions. However, this approach proved ineffective in practice. Marketers often overwhelm customers with technical details, sometimes even deflecting value propositions back to buyers: “What do you want it to do?”

A 2003 CEB/Motista study revealed that 86% of surveyed respondents saw “no” meaningful difference between top vendors, despite functional capability variations.

Decision-Making Reality

Research demonstrates that group opinion and risk aversion heavily influence purchasing decisions. People avoid recommending vendors that might damage their professional reputation.

Recommended Strategies

Specialize: Focus on specific target markets rather than diluting messaging across multiple segments.

Foster emotional safety: Build relationships with industry analysts and thought leaders; referrals provide social proof and reassurance.

Foster trust: Learn about customer goals and create targeted material connecting products to specific needs through unexpected insights.

Reduce cognitive load: Develop clear value propositions rather than expecting customers to intuit solutions independently.

The Power of Brands in B2B Decision-Making

cahoover@gmail.com (Christopher Hoover) — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

How do buyers make decisions in complex B2B sales, where large sums of money and critical business outcomes are at stake? A recent study sheds new light on this question, revealing brands’ surprising and significant role in B2B purchasing behavior.

The study challenges the conventional wisdom that B2B buying is an entirely rational process driven solely by objective factors like product specifications, price, and measurable ROI. Instead, the researchers found that brand perceptions and trust are important factors shaping decision-making, especially in high-risk or high-uncertainty situations.

Brand sensitivity is U-shaped

One of the study’s key findings is that buyers’ sensitivity to brand influence follows a U-shaped pattern relative to the perceived risk of the purchase decision.

When the stakes are low, brand matters. Buyers default to choosing a well-known or trusted brand as a choice-simplification heuristic. For example, think of shopping at a grocery and facing a wall of toothpaste options – relying on a well-known brand reduces the effort required to decide.

As the risk level rises from low to moderate, buyers tend to evaluate their options more rationally and systematically. They scrutinize product features, compare prices, and assess total cost of ownership. Brand perceptions are secondary to these more objective criteria.

As risk levels climb into the high range, an interesting shift occurs. Faced with the complexity and uncertainty of a high-stakes decision, buyers again turn to brand – this time as a risk-reduction heuristic. An established brand’s trusted reputation and proven track record can provide assurance and mitigate the perceived risk of the decision.

“The so-called IBM effect (i.e., the ‘you won’t get fired for buying IBM’ principle) provides a well-accepted, contemporary example of how buyers weigh subjective factors relative to objective factors.”

For decades, IBM established itself as the enterprise systems market leader despite lacking superior systems, functionality, or pricing.

Brand dominance is self-sustaining

Once a brand achieves a certain level of recognition and trust, it can enter a virtuous cycle that continually strengthens its position in the market. Here’s how this virtuous cycle plays out:

As a brand becomes more widely recognized and trusted, more buyers choose it as a risk-reduction heuristic, especially in high-stakes situations. These choices lead to more successful customer experiences, which in turn generate positive word-of-mouth, testimonials, and case studies.

This additional social proof and evidence of the brand’s value further enhances its reputation and trustworthiness, making it an even more appealing choice for risk-averse buyers. As more buyers continue to choose the brand, its market share and revenue grow, enabling greater investment in marketing, product development, and customer support.

These investments help to maintain and extend the brand’s recognition, perceived value, and trust levels, attracting even more customers and reinforcing the cycle. Over time, this self-reinforcing loop can create a significant advantage for the leading brand, making it increasingly difficult for lesser-known brands to gain traction, even if they offer comparable or superior products or services.

Challenger brands must focus on building recognition and trust

While competing against a dominant player’s brand recognition may be difficult, challenger brands can still gain traction by relentlessly building trust with their target customers.

Build recognition

A challenger brand trying to gain recognition against a well-known brand should consider reducing the “surface area” of its market. For example, a challenger brand might focus on marketing to specific accounts (ABM), a specific geographic region, a specific vertical, or some combination. Doing this makes it easier for the challenger brand to build a more substantial share of voice relative to the better-known brand.

For example, challenger brands like Snowflake (cloud data warehousing) and Databricks (data analytics) have successfully employed vertical-specific strategies. They focused on healthcare, financial services, and retail sectors, where their solutions offer unique value. By building deep expertise and a strong reputation within these verticals, these brands have been able to compete effectively against larger, more established players.

Build trust

Social proof should be integral to the brand experience, woven throughout the marketing and sales journey. By consistently showcasing the positive experiences of real customers, brands can build a sense of trust and validation that can help overcome buyer objections.

This means using customer testimonials and quotes on the website and in marketing collateral, case studies that showcase specific customer successes and ROI, customer reference programs that allow prospects to speak directly with satisfied clients, third-party reviews and ratings on industry-specific review sites or platforms, and customer advocacy programs that encourage clients to spread positive word-of-mouth.

In complex sales, trust is the currency of success.

Brand matters

CROs are often skeptical of investing in brand, preferring to invest primarily – or only – in growth marketing. This focus makes a lot of sense – companies either grow or they die. However, there’s a good case that for complex B2B, brands are more than just names or logos. They are mental shortcuts, risk-reduction heuristics, and repositories of trust that can shape buyer behavior. For B2B marketers and salespeople, understanding and leveraging the power of brand at different levels of decision risk is not just a matter of aesthetic – it’s a matter of business success.

Source Study: “When do B2B Brands Influence the Decision-Making of Organizational Buyers? An Examination of the Relationship between Purchase Risk and Brand Sensitivity” by Brian Brown et al.

6 Rules for Building Brand

cahoover@gmail.com (Christopher Hoover) — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

First published in 2010 and revised in 2014, Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow is a classic for marketers. It’s based on decades of research that are consistent in their findings about buying and brand performance; findings Sharp calls the “laws” of marketing because they are consistent across industries, across price points, and across time. The book presents these laws in context, and explores their meaning and marketing applications.

The central idea is to make a brand easy to buy by

ensuring mental availability: build connections between the brand and a category when a person is not actively buying
ensuring physical availability: ensuring the product is easy to find and investigate when a person is actively buying

Most people, most of the time, aren’t buying in whatever category you’re selling. Your job as a marketer is to build “mental availability” – connections between your brand and the category in a consumer’s mind. Now, when the person does engage with a category, the connection with your brand is established.

The evidence for this is the strong correlation between share of voice and market share. Share of voice (the amount of media spending for a product vs the total media spend for the category) has been established as correlated with market share across every product imaginable; from consumer goods, to banking, to commodities like grain and steel.

The book is written for a general audience, and much of the examples and insights are related to customer goods. However, it’s a mistake to think that B2B marketing is an entirely different beast. It absolutely is not. All of Sharp’s laws are applicable B2B, with the caveat that B2B marketers have to extend their strategy beyond Sharp’s book. Sharp ends at the purchase decision, which is different for toothpaste than it is for, say, an enterprise security solution.

The way I think of it is that Sharp’s laws are related to branding and top-of-funnel campaigns in B2B. This is important because so many B2B companies get this wrong, using the same rational argument techniques for branding campaigns as they do in their product marketing. (Using purely rational arguments in your product marketing is also a mistake. There are few purchase decisions as emotionally rife as a B2B. Making a bad decision around toothpaste will not likely cause you to lose your job, but making a bad database recommendation certainly could. This is a topic for another post.)

Here, then are Sharp’s laws of marketing. For B2B, think of them as laws of branding and awareness.

Law 1: Refresh and build associations

The purpose of advertising is to construct and refresh memory structures. Memory structures are connections in the mind between the brand and the brand’s message. For example, Coca-Cola wants to build and reinforce a connection between Coke and fun times in people’s lives, like when everyone was out having a great time at a BBQ with their family. Microsoft wants to build a connection between Office and productivity.

Memory structures must exist in a consumer’s head, or they will not notice your brand. Practical advice for marketers is to consider existing associations you can use and reinforce with your brand.

Law 2: Avoid being silent

No brand, even the largest and most established brands, can afford to be silent. Memory structures strengthen with reinforcement and weaken with silence. People’s minds are busy, and information fades quickly if it’s not reinforced. (Think about the times you crammed for a test and how well you remember the subject one week after the test.)

As time passes and people change, brands must constantly reinforce mental associations. Even well-established brands like Coca-Cola must do this, so they regularly update their advertisements.

Practical advice for smaller B2B advertisers: If you have a small budget, consider using it on an ABM strategy to reach target buyers more often.

Law 3: Make sure you get noticed

For marketing to work, it needs to be noticed, processed, and linked to the correct brand. Many companies instead focus on differentiation, explaining why their product is different (and better) than the competition. However, this can be a wasted effort unless the consumer actively researches the category.

A key message from Sharp is that salience – how prominent or noticeable something is – is more important than differentiation, at least at the top of the funnel. At this stage, it matters most that you build the mental connection between the brand and the category.

Practical advice is that when creating your brand, you have to figure out how to get it noticed among the competition. How can you stand out in a crowded market? What is distinctive about your assets?

Law 4: Create and use distinctive brand assets

You can spend a lot of time, energy, and money building a mental association between a message and a brand. But if the assets aren’t distinctive to your brand, your efforts will be ineffective.

And “distinctive” doesn’t (only) mean distinct in the sense that it’s easier to see, like brighter colors. It means distinct in the sense that it’s associated with your brand, and your brand only. Otherwise, you’ll dilute the connection. One way to measure this is to research brand assets in terms of fame (how often the assets is associated with any brand), and uniqueness (how strongly the asset is associated with your brand). Consider this research on the Johnnie Walker Red Whiskey brand assets:

We see two assets the company should reinforce and protect: the distinctive label and the walking man. Other assets tested didn’t fare as well, such as the color red. Most people didn’t associate red with any brand, and of those that did associate the color with a brand, it wasn’t particularly unique to Johnnie Walker. Finally, we see the asset “keep walking,” which wasn’t well known but was strongly associated with the brand. Efforts to promote this asset could make it better known and a stronger advocate for the brand.

Practical advice is to research your brand’s distinctive assets – assets that consumers associate with your brand and with nothing else. Then you need to use and protect these.

Law 5: Be consistent

Sharp points out that consistency in brand identity is something that many brand strategies lack, particularly across campaigns. For example, when a new campaign is created, most of the attention is placed on what is new and fresh. More attention should be placed on making sure the branding elements are similar and consistent; someone who saw the last marketing campaign should understand that the new campaign comes from the same brand.

Proponents of integrated marketing campaigns have emphasized the importance of consistency, but it’s a mistake to embrace the idea of consistency across media but not consistency across your brand’s distinctive assets. Remember, too, that the objective is to create mental associations before the consumer is actively buying. At this stage, emphasize consistency in the visual, verbal or style of branding elements. It is only when there is discipline in this consistency that distinctive brand assets build.

Law 6: Stay competitive

This is where the rubber hits the road regarding your efforts to build mental associations for your brand. Your brand must be available when a person enters a category and are interested in buying. This can mean that it is physically available, such as a brand of toothpaste that must be sitting on a shelf. It can also mean digitally available, such as findable in Google SERPs.

For most technical enterprise B2B, availability goes beyond being found in SERPs. This is when product marketing comes into play – we’ve captured the consumer’s attention, now we need to take advantage of it by removing obstacles, explaining features, encouraging trials, and addressing concerns about pricing, support, or longevity.

The Surprising Power of Price: Marketing Can Influence Product Efficacy

cahoover@gmail.com (Christopher Hoover) — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR: Higher-priced products are more effective than lower-priced (but otherwise identical) products. They don’t just seem more effective; they actually are more effective.

Have you ever wondered why brand-name Ibuprofen seems to work better than generic, even though each contain the same ingredients? Recent research suggests that the answer may lie not just in the product itself but also in its marketing – specifically, the price.

Higher Price = Better Efficacy

A fascinating series of experiments demonstrated that pricing can significantly impact product efficacy, a phenomenon the researchers termed the “placebo effect of marketing actions.” Their findings, published in the Journal of Marketing Research, shed light on the complex relationship between price and perceived quality.

The experiments focused on an energy drink called SoBe, which claims to improve mental acuity. After consuming the drink, which was available at either its regular price or a discounted price, participants were asked to solve a series of puzzles. Those who purchased the drink at a discount consistently solved fewer puzzles than those who bought it at the regular (higher) price. This suggests that the mere act of paying less for a product can actually reduce its effectiveness.

What’s behind this phenomenon? The researchers propose that it all comes down to expectancies – the consumers’ beliefs and expectations about a product’s efficacy. When we see a high price, we tend to believe that the product must be of high quality and, therefore, more effective. Conversely, a low price can signal lower quality and effectiveness. These beliefs are activated automatically and non-consciously, influencing our behavior without us even realizing it.

The study also revealed a “desirable” placebo effect: When participants were exposed to strong advertising claims about the drink’s effectiveness, those who paid the regular price solved more puzzles than those in the control group who didn’t consume the drink at all. This highlights the power of marketing to not only influence perception but also enhance products’ real-world efficacy.

Explaining the disconnect between objective quality vs. perceived quality

These findings have implications beyond energy drinks and puzzle-solving. As Gregory Berns discusses in his commentary on the study, the placebo effect of pricing may help explain the well-documented disconnect between objective product quality (as measured by expert ratings or objective criteria) and perceived quality in consumers’ minds.

That is, if higher prices can lead to improved product performance, this may partly explain why consumers continue to buy expensive branded products even when cheaper alternatives are available.

However, Berns also raises some questions about the neural mechanisms behind this effect. While the SoBe study suggests that expectancies are the key mediator, more research is needed to understand exactly how beliefs about price and quality are represented and activated in the brain. Neuroimaging techniques like fMRI may help to shed light on these questions and deepen our understanding of the placebo effect.

For marketers, these findings underscore the importance of carefully considering pricing strategies and the messages conveyed through advertising and branding. While slashing prices to attract customers may be tempting, doing so could have unintended consequences for product perceptions and even actual efficacy. At the same time, emphasizing the quality and effectiveness of a product through strong advertising claims could enhance its real-world performance.