5 Psychological hacks that businesses should use in 2023

1) Restaurants where seating is visible from outside, seat patrons from front to back. This results in making the restaurant seem fuller and more popular. A social proof that encourages others to join.

2) Menu with detailed descriptions like mentioning the geography can raise sales by 27%. Ethnic labels and adjectives work better than nouns, also the label directs the person’s attention to features of the dish, bringing out certain flavors and textures. The same should work for beauty products as well. By explaining the source story of your ingredients one could increase the value perception.

3) For businesses that offer subscription pricing, breaking the price into smaller units like per day or per week reduces the pain of associated with the costs. Additionally changing the reference, by comparing it to the prize of pizza, a discretionary spend that most of us mindlessly do, can make it easier for people to take the leap.

4) Studies have shown that subtraction is difficult for us. Evolution has made it easier for us to add to our lives. Plus with the endowment effect, once we have something we put greater value on it. Therefore if a car business wants to sell more accessories. A better option is to provide a fully loaded option and then ask consumers to subtract what they don’t want. They will end with more accessories than if you had asked to add the accessories. The same can be applied to any business which sells packages.

5) Another simple approach to increasing sales is to have a cashless payment option. The pain associated with payments is much less on cards than cash, resulting in higher spending. The same concept is deployed in Casinos, where the use of chips, rather than hard-earned physical money reduces the pain and allows more gambling.

Psychologist Amos Tversky once said “the secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.”

Leaving some amount of inefficiency in your calendar is the biggest productivity hack! It gives you time to think, reflect & see the gaps that no one else can see. In today’s time of finding the efficiency maxima for each resource (time, money, mental bandwidth), most people are unable to find their own burst of genius.

That office commute without scrolling through videos or that 1 day of WFH outside of the commotion of your office or that break that you take — might just not be wasted time.

Organizations that don’t retain their learning undergo a suffering that shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Culture eats Strategy for Breakfast, Employee Morale for Lunch & Execution for Dinner.You know you are rich when you don’t know how much money is there in your account. But when you’re poor, you know it till the last penny.

The same happens with experiences. If you’re able to pull out one relevant experience for a situation that needs problem solving, you’re already rich. The idea is to never get to that last penny. Do more. See more. Build more. Read more. Experience more.

A lot of organizations (specially startups) do not document their Reviews & Decision making Assumptions well, thereby, leaving a lot of knowledge with an employee. The life cycle of an employee in a role is about 18–24 months (if you’re able to keep someone at the same role for longer, please get a culture check done as you may have bigger problems in place)! In fast paced startups, this knowledge retention may be as low as 6–12 months.

This leads to the organization scrambling to build forward, wasting a lot of time & resources. And most of the time the answer lies in the most meme worthy movie — “Ye Raaz bhi usi ke saath chala gaya”!

Don’t let it happen, document well.

For all those who call their organisations family — A key differentiator in success is that dysfunctional families can still work whereas dysfunctional Organisations can almost never.

Families, they work out decently well as the feeling of “unconditional” love overcomes one’s weaknesses. Organizations can align themselves to structure their teams so as to maximize leverage on individual strengths.

But the most fundamental difference lies in the fact that in families, it is the Effort (input) that matters but in business systems, it is the Result (output) that matters more.