Word: productivity
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...retailers may have to pin their hopes on the week after Christmas, when shoppers typically return gifts, redeem gift cards and look for post-holiday discounts. Lots of leftover product in stores and even deeper discounts, analysts say, could provide a year-end boost. Still, it will not be enough to save a bleak 2008 for most retailers. "For many stores, there is no first, second, or third quarter - 25 to 30% of their volume comes from the back-end of the year," says NPD's Cohen. "There is no second chance. You wait the whole year for the holiday...
...Because product specifications - like pixel count - disproportionately sway our decisions as shoppers, even when our own experiences tell us they don't matter. That holds true for a range of things we buy, from cell phones to potato chips, as demonstrated by a series of studies to be published in the April issue of the Journal of Consumer Research. "Specifications can be very misleading, even if marketers are honest," says Christopher Hsee, a professor of behavioral sciences and marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, who ran the experiments with researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. "Consumers...
...each circle they'd drawn, those people were then given a choice between towels, and 83% picked A, 26 percentage points higher than the control group. By assigning a number to their own experiences, "they changed their decisions," says Hsee. It's not hard to imagine using a product, talking about it on a web site for other consumers, and, in the process, upping your own chances of buying more...
...make sure you listen to your true preferences when you're at the mall? "First of all, consumers should experience the product before they look at specifications," says Hsee. "Sometimes marketers use a big font, but we should try to ignore it." Reading about how many coils a mattress has only after you've laid on it for a while should keep your decision-making more in line with your real perception of comfort...
...doesn't believe the common state has a future, and occasionally hints that his Serb-dominated statelet may secede from Bosnia. From the other side of the ethnic divide, leading Bosniak politician Haris Silajdzic repeatedly calls for the abolishment of the Serbian Republic, which he sees as a product of a Serbian ethnic cleansing campaign during the war. "It appears that the status quo created by genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes has acquired a degree of sanctity in Bosnia and Herzegovina and that genocide and ethnic cleansing are being rewarded," Silajdzic warned in a recent letter...