The financial benefits of being happy
This article is kindly contributed by StudioSpace agency Capuchin - a boutique consultancy, specialising in applying behavioural science to business challenges. We love how they can help interpret and uncover insight and human motivations, but also how they apply this to action in a real business context.
More bad news for the misery guts. Good news for those full of festive cheer. Not only do happier people live longer (and are happier), but they might also be offered lower prices.
In this paper, across six field experiments, the researchers found that signals of happiness result in discounts. For example, when two researchers went into phone repair shops with a cracked Samsung and asked how much it’d be to get an upgrade, a “I’m a happy person” phone case reduced the price by about £21.
Across all the experiments, the discount for happy people was in the range of 5-9%
Money really can buy happiness
This just in.
Researchers created ads for fake brands, which were given either high or low prices; after being exposed to them, participants then completed a measure of happiness. Those who’d seen the expensive products were significantly less happy.
A follow-up study showed that exposure to high prices also made people less prosocial.
It scraped over 22,000 product reviews on Amazon and measured the number of ‘helpful’ ratings each comment had received. Positive hyperbole increased review helpfulness, while negative hyperbole decreased it.
Whether this translates into persuasive comms like adverts remains to be seen, but it’s certainly worth testing (i.e., use positive hyperbole for yourself and avoid negative hyperbole for e.g., competitors or unfulfilled need states).
Be positive
This lovely and delightful study showed the power of positive language.
The researchers found that positive emotion keywords increase the likelihood of clicking on paid search ads. Results from six studies supported this and showed that positive emotion reduced persuasion knowledge (i.e., made people less sceptical).
Interestingly, search results for queries with positive emotion keywords currently contain fewer ads, suggesting there’s a big opportunity here to exploit.
What are you waiting for?!
