Paul takes Craig Reucassel shopping, but it doesn’t end the way he had hoped.
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Sources
Argo, J.J., Dahl, D. W. and A.C. Morales (2008). Positive consumer contagion: Responses to attractive others in a retail context, Journal of Marketing Research, XLV (December), 690-701.
Baumeister, R. F.; Bratslavsky, E.; Muraven, M.; Tice, D. M. (1998). “Ego depletion: Is the active self a limited resource?”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74: 1252–1265. Continue reading
This piece was co-written with Kathryn Chalmers
Consumer vulnerability is often described in terms of consumer characteristics or demographics such as age, disability, gender, race/ethnicity, low or limited literacy, and level of education. In general, these measures are useful indicators of potential vulnerability, and most government departments, large institutions and commercial businesses use these to operationalise their vulnerability and disability programs and policies.
But recent research suggests that there is no empirical proof that biophysical characteristics of individuals should be the sole basis on which to define consumer vulnerability. In fact, consumers might be vulnerable due to transient stages or short-term and less concrete states such as grief-related vulnerability, stress, ego-depletion or fatigue.
Despite the current “hoo-ha” arising from the ACC report into organised crime and drugs in sport, it is unlikely that lots of fans will stop supporting their sport.
We are surprisingly poor judges of how a particular event will make us feel into the future. In other words, we rely on how we feel right now to predict how we might feel about something later. Psychologists call it affective forecasting.
We also tend to “misremember” the way that we thought we would feel, revising our predictions after the fact to suit how we actually feel at that time, and this is all done without us knowing it is going on.
Something to remember as we head into #AustraliaDay twitter.com/tribalinsight/…
— Paul Harrison (@tribalinsight) January 25, 2013
During the past forty years global rates of overweight and obesity have risen dramatically. In 2010 more than 155 million children worldwide were overweight (more than one in ten) and of these approximately 30-45 million were obese, or between two and three per cent of the world’s 5-17 year-old children.
In Australia, more than 14 million people fall within the overweight or obese range, and Australia is ranked as one of the fattest nations in the developed world. The prevalence of obesity in Australia has more than doubled in the past 20 years, and children are at particular risk of overweight and obesity.
But the answer is probably not a ban on all marketing to children. In the first instance, simply the practicalities of a blanket ban would be incredibly difficult, particularly in trying to keep up with the constantly changing promotional environment.
From Fairfax Media
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Feeling a compulsion to spend money even though there is nothing you really need?
Don’t worry, it’s just biology. The Australian Retailers Association predicts $14.8 billion will be spent in the coming weeks, helped along by human nature and the fear that if you’re not in the shops, you’re missing out
“As human beings, you assume that if lots of people want something, then we need to be part of it – it is the scarcity effect at work,” Dr Paul Harrison, a senior lecturer in consumer behaviour and advertising at the Deakin Graduate School of Business, said.
This is an excerpt from a speech that I gave at the ASIC Summer School in 2011. It relates to comments I made to Patrick Durkin of the Australian Financial Review
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If the goal of product disclosure statement (PDS) is to help consumers make the most appropriate choices, we have to start with the consumer, rather than the document.
So, when we think about consumers, decision-making, and even consumer protection, we need to understand how people decide, and the processes they use to understand information.
And it just might be time to start again with how we protect consumers, and how we approach what we currently call the product disclosure statement.
