Matt Johnson's Blog, page 6
May 18, 2023
How to Foster a Workplace Encouraging Compassion, Wellness, and Inclusion
The application of psychology to business is typically associated with outwardly focused endeavors, such as understanding consumer behavior, or behavioral design. However, insights from psychology can also be applied to increase organizational effectiv...
What is Doom Tourism? A Consumer Psychology Perspective
The statues of Easter Island are as iconic as they are mysterious. Erected over 600 hundred years ago, they also provide a cautionary tale for the present day.
The small, isolated island in the South Pacific, known by its earliest inhabitants as Rapa N...
Marketing Tactics Using System 2 Decision-Making
Do you know how to drive a manual car? If you do, kudos because in the United States only 1 percent of these cars are produced! And it makes sense. Why think when you don’t have to?
This mentality is not unique to the auto industry. It is directly anal...
May 17, 2023
Consumer Psychology Lessons from the Science of Photo-Taking and User-Generated Content
Key points for applying the science of photo-taking to optimize user-generated content:
Brands often encourage their consumers to share photos with others and post content of the consumer experience on social media. However, the intent to share may redu...
Guilt, Dirty Money, and their Impact on Consumer Psychology
“True! --nervous --very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses --not destroyed --not dulled them.”
So begins Edgar Allen Poe’s famous The Tell-Tale Heart. It tells the story of...
The Power of The Underdog Effect in Brand Storytelling
Imagine having to sell your dog for $15 to desperately make ends meet.
Before winning three out of nine Oscar nominations and writing the Rocky script in days, Sylvester Stallone did just that. When offered $360,000 for the script with the condition he ...
May 16, 2023
How Irony Drives Consumer Psychology and Influences Marketing
Irony has a special place in the human psyche. Otherwise mundane concepts suddenly come to life when they’re recognized to have an ironic quality. British comedian David Mitchell captures this perfectly when describing the media’s obsession with the “i...
The Surprising Consumer Psychology of Product Names
In August 2020, a small Canadian Brewery made global headlines. Hell's Basement Brew of Alberta gave one of their beers an unconventional name. It was a word from Maori, the language spoken by an indigenous group of New Zealanders. Their new beer was v...
Applying The Neuroscience of Pain to Influence Consumer Psychology
The careers of athletes are often defined by their mistakes. In the summer of 2002, Spanish goalkeeper Santiago Cañizares committed the mother of all career-defining errors.
This was no pivotal bad pass, poor save, or tactical error. But a stroke of ba...
How Essentialism Drives Consumer Psychology for Big Data Movies
In 1987, a group of moviegoers watched a film which was never shown again. The reason? This particular audience said so. This wasn’t a typical group of film buffs, but rather a test audience serving as a focus group for the movie studio.
The issue? They...
