Brain Food: Chaaarge It!

One would assume most people are interested in a long, healthy and productive life. If this is true, then one could also expect that people would make better choices about what they put in their bodies from the grocery store and avoid spending money on “unhealthy” food.

Imagine a scenario where customers are given a choice to buy food that is either healthy or unhealthy. Now add to this picture their ability to pay for what they load into their shopping cart by credit card or cash. What do they choose to do? Will the deferral of pain by paying with plastic override their good sense to make healthy choices? Will they pay with cash but buy less? Or will they buy nothing at all?

In a multiple-phase study to investigate purchasing decisions, researchers found that despite shoppers’ awareness that certain foods were unhealthy, they would buy them more frequently when using a credit or debit card. When paying with plastic, the brain’s impulse control went out the window and their baskets were filled with more cookies.

Conversely, shoppers only able to pay by cash tended to curb their impulsive responses and reduce the number and value of unhealthy choices.

Given that many shoppers have trouble regulating their impulsive responses, the researchers suggested that cash payment could be used as a self-regulation tool, while cash-only payment systems could have a substantive degree of relevance for consumer welfare. The thinking is that if people were only able to pay with actual money, they would be acutely aware of the “pain” of paying with cash, and would be more likely to make better purchasing choices and not give in to their impulses.

Imagine a store that says “Cash only ‘cause we’re trying to keep you healthy.” Since the retail business is one of selling stuff, I suspect the tagline would be left in the boardroom. More likely you’d see, “It’s a healthy choice and easy to buy. So use your card and give it a try…”

We all think we are able to “keep it together” in the shopping aisle, but studies like “How credit card payments increase unhealthy food purchases: visceral regulation of vices,” featured in the Journal of Consumer Research, are pointing out that self-control is not entirely, well, under our control. Holding impulsive desires in check can be made easier or more difficult by seemingly unrelated contextual factors that influence both visceral and emotional responses. These emotional feelings lead people to put things in their shopping cart, even though they know that they are putting their health at risk.

You might think that one of the reasons why shoppers buy more on a credit or debit card is because they don’t pay attention to the price of the products they are choosing as much as when they’re counting out the bills at the checkout counter. It turns out that customers using plastic forms of payments don’t have price blindness at all when they’re making product selections. In fact, when asked to estimate how much they spent, those who used credit or debit cards often reported spending more than those who used cash, though, in general, their estimations of how much they had spent were pretty close to the actual total price of their shopping baskets.

In a previous blog, I described how, on a brain level, price tags are painful. Paying with cash in the moment also has an effect on how much we buy and can be seen as related to a feeling of loss. Counting out bills at the register can sometimes diminish the positive feeling of a purchase.

Both cash payments and high price tags can have a tendency to activate subcortical regions of the brain – the limbic system and the insula in particular – and this can highjack the “to-buy-or-not-to-buy” decision-making process. These old brain structures geared towards the prediction of painful events have kept us climbing the evolutionary ladder. They kept us safe, not sorry, and have allowed us to have lunch rather than be lunch.

The insula is an area of the brain those job it is to perceive situations that may cause pain and help us avoid them. It is a pain prediction mechanism. Part of the same system is the amygdala and it is exquisitely good at perceiving and helping us react to fearful situations. Combined, these features of our brains can have dramatic effects on how we perceive and interact with others and how we navigate the sales floor.

According to the aforementioned study, results suggest that the painlessness of paying by credit card is not due to price neglect. “Even when participants pay attention to price, paying by credit card reduces the pain of payment.” So, despite the fact that we know better, we don’t do better, and before you know it, we are loading those delicious cakes into our cart. Providing customers with a way to mitigate the pain of a purchase through the use of digital technologies – credit or debit cards or some other mechanism – will lead to more and higher-value purchases. Putting off the pain of paying with cash today, knowing that a statement will come in the mail a month later, has proven to be a very effective way for us to buy stuff.

However, there is a downside to easy payment with plastic. Even though customers in the same study willingly purchased more things that were clearly unhealthy than they should have, they also just as often reported regret from doing so. This was especially the case with impulse purchases. The thrill of putting off pain is short lived and often regretted later. This post-purchase regret, often referred to as cognitive dissonance, has an influence on customers’ perception of the retailer and brands they shop because their lingering feeling about the experience is not one of joy but, instead, “Doh! What did I just do?!”

David Kepron is Vice President – Global Design Strategies with Marriott International. His focus is on the creation of compelling customer experiences within a unique group of Marriott brands called the “Lifestyle Collection,” including Autograph, Renaissance and Moxy hotels. As a frequently requested speaker to retailers, hoteliers and design professionals nationally and internationally, David shares his expertise on subjects ranging from consumer behaviors and trends, brain science and buying behavior, store design and visual merchandising as well as creativity and innovation. David is also author of “Retail (r)Evolution: Why Creating Right-Brain Stores will Shape the Future of Shopping in a Digitally Driven World,” published by ST Media Group Intl. and available online from ST Books. @davidkepron; www.retail-r-evolution.com.