Phil Barden > Quotes

“In making decisions, conscious or unconscious, big or small, about our lives and what we buy and do, the context, framework, decision interface, medium and pathways through which we reach decisions may have a greater influence on the decisions we take than the long-term consequences of the decision.”
― Phil Barden, Decoded: The Science Behind Why We Buy

“that when we visit websites the autopilot will derive a first impression within less than one second – and this impression strongly influences our subsequent behaviour.”
― Phil Barden, Decoded: The Science Behind Why We Buy

“We all know that, particularly in mature markets, the quality at the product level hardly offers a perceivable and big enough difference between competing products, as indicated by the success of private labels. And since, in most categories, customers are quite satisfied with the product performance, a relevant differentiation at the pure product level is increasingly hard to provide.”
― Phil Barden

“The experiment cited earlier that revealed that brands induce ‘cortical relief’ shows that strong brands are processed in System 1. Indeed, the hallmark of a strong brand is to activate System 1 and circumvent System 2 processing. Weak brands, by contrast, activate System 2, i.e. consumers have to think about the purchase decision.”
― Phil Barden

“The autopilot needs about 10,000 hours’ experience of a specific topic before intuition develops fully.”
― Phil Barden, Decoded: The Science Behind Why We Buy

“Part of the interest and importance of this finding is that it shows that cognitive influences, originating here purely at the word-level, can reach down and modulate activations in the first stage of cortical processing that represents the value of sensory stimuli.”
― Phil Barden

“Brands are frames: they implicitly influence the perceived value of products and product experience through framing. The impact of frames, and thus brands, on our behavior is implicit and we therefore do not consciously experience it.”
― Phil Barden

“The nature of the relationship between consumer and brand is not that of an interpersonal relationship. Customers do not buy a brand’s personality traits but its expected instrumentality to achieve a certain goal.”
― Phil Barden

“Another example of the certainty principle is that we value things we already own particularly highly. Nothing is more certain than holding something in our hands. Consumers who were given a coffee mug demanded twice as much to give it up as other consumers were willing to pay for it. Behavioural economists refer to this bias as the ‘endowment effect’.”
― Phil Barden

“Studies show that if we do not have a direct comparison, we are more likely to accept far higher prices for a product simply because the reference frame is missing. We need comparisons to make decisions. Value and cost are fundamentally relativistic.”
― Phil Barden

“When talking about prices and how they are processed and perceived, we naturally focus on the cost side of the value–cost equation. Indeed, we saw earlier that prices trigger the pain area in the brain. However, prices also influence the value side of the equation as well. For consumers the price is also a guiding signal to evaluate product quality because they have learned – whether it is objectively true or not – that ‘quality has its price’.”
― Phil Barden