Question

You work at an advertising company and were told to sell a product. Create a script for a commercial using one or more of the types of cognitive biases to sell your product. The network will only allow you up to 90 seconds of air time. Be creative and have fun! Identify the bias you used and support why your product will sell.

Answer 1

Anchoring- Anchoring is a bias that causes customers to rely on the first impression of a product that they see and hear about the product.

As example- John is my customer, he has came to me to buy a car. He might be focused on leather seats of the car. I will try to tell more about the leather seats of the car so that anchors will be fixed on his mind. This kind of anchoring can make a customer oblivious about other things like quality of the car’s engine and gas mileage etc.

So I will use this cognitive bias because it is very easy to convince an anchored customer. An anchored customer may be unconscious about other important things of consideration. So I can say that an anchored customer will buy my product and I will able to sell my products by using this biasness.

Framing Bias- Framing is very commonly used bias in marketing. This framing bias is a bias where customers can react on a particular choice in different ways. The reaction will depended on how this choice was presented. So we can say that framing can influence a customer on the basis of how the selling products are presented and framed.Sometimes we can present a negative and a positive choice in front of the customers. Maximum customers will chose the positively framed one.

I will use this cognitive bias, because this bias can present information about a product in a proper way. I will use statistical framing because it will be more supportive or significant and can make my customers impressed about the products. So I am going to choose framing bias for selling my products and earning profits.

Choice- Supportive Bias –We all have different choices. Sometimes we wants to get some support evidence for preferring a thing. People have tended to trust any kind of information that seems to be supporting their choices.

Choice-Supportive bias can reinforce the customers to buy their preferred things. When I can get the information about my customer’s preference I will try to sell products according to their preference. So that customer’s decision of buying becomes confirmed decision. So I will use this cognitive bias for selling my products.

This bias can work in my favor when I already have gained a customer’s trust. So I thing this bias strategy is the most powerful technique to convince a customer.

Conclusion – After discussing all these cognitive biases, I can say that these biases are very much powerful in marketing purposes. So I am going to use these biases for selling my products and I believe that I can earn a very good amount of profit by using these biases.

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MacKenzie, S.B. and Podsakoff, P.M., 2012. Common method bias in marketing: Causes, mechanisms, and procedural remedies. Journal of Retailing, 88(4), pp.542-555.

Blumenthal-Barby, J.S. and Krieger, H., 2015. Cognitive biases and heuristics in medical decision making: a critical review using a systematic search strategy. Medical Decision Making, 35(4), pp.539-557.

Kahneman, D. and Egan, P., 2011. Thinking, fast and slow(Vol. 1). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Liedtka, J., 2015. Perspective: Linking design thinking with innovation outcomes through cognitive bias reduction. Journal of Product Innovation Management, 32(6), pp.925-938.