Do you really want to hurt me?

I'm a huge fan of hybrid science - not the science of hybrid technology (well, in fact I am) - but when different sciences get together and new finding appears. Like when you combine physics and biology and get biophysics. We saw this example lately when the danish brand guru Martin Lindstrom merged brain science with marketing and identified that brands are like religion to us. It makes us feel connected and a part of something bigger. By exposing test persons to brands and measuring the brains activity centers he were able to find that the same part of the brain that is activated by religious impacts also reacted when exposed to a brand.

This combination is interesting and especially when it comes to customer behavior.

Some years ago a couple of brain scientist found that when one pay for something it activates the brains pain center. Women has a higher pain level because they have to give birth to our children and they claim that it hurts. I'm glad that women get this honor and I must say that I do not envy them. They are proud of what they do and lets keep it that way - I'm not that excited about the science finding new ways of giving birth. The thing about the money and the pain center is that because women has a higher pain level they use more money than men. Think about it. Your wife of girlfriend show you the newest scoop inside shoes and the first that comes to your mind is - that looks expensive (which is probably right).

Ok, it is a great finding and we have known that for a while. But what we have not known for a while is that virtual payments like credit cards removes the feeling of actually paying and giving your money away. The result of using a credit card is in other terms that your spending increases as you don't feel like you spend your money. In the same way as Martin Lindstrom measured an activity in the brain when exposed to a brand you can measure that the pain center does not react when paying with a credit card.

This is interesting in terms of increasing customers spend in a store or at the internet. There are a few examples of online shopping who uses this proactively to tell the user that the do not need to pay upfront. Is this really the secret behind the success of the internet? That customers only are able to pay with credit cards? Well, many people from the traditional retail stores claim that they can't sell as much online as they can in their physical stores. Wrong - they can sell much more. They just haven't tried yet. And, to be honest - you don't want to hurt your customers just for buying from you... Do you?