is Useful

Shops have always delighted in setting prices slightly below the full amount of a dollar or pound, and whether it’s 9.99 or 9.95 us consumers still feel it’s much better value. A new study has shown that this 1p or 5p saving still gets us by the purse strings, with a 15% increase in sales over the ‘full’ priced equivalent. But why is this? Psychologists talk about the perceived savings that affect our emotions much more than they should - and why our 40th birthday hits us more than our 39th. As emotional creatures we should not be surprised to be manipulated this way, and any shop keeper would be a fool to lose 15% of their business.

Ironically, in the US and Canada the price at $9.99 is not even accurate. Once you take your purchase to the checkout you’ll find tax has been added - around 8% in New York for example - making your purchase over the round $10.00 figure that is such a barrier. Of course by that point you already have the item in hand and you’re ready to go and as humans we hate to prove our own decisions wrong by putting the product back on the shelf.

Google, Yahoo and Adobe have just announced that they have worked together to enable search results to crawl not only HTML, but also Flash files. Interesting news indeed. For years now web builders have had to build two sites in parallel if they use Flash - one for the users, and one for the search engines that preferred eating text in HTML form.

Now this raises a few interesting questions. First up, what will happen to the search results while Google and Yahoo work out how to rank and rate Flash content? No Flash designer has ever had to consider the SEO effects of their Flash coding so surely there must be some pretty badly constructed Flash content out there, at least in terms of what Google is used to seeing. Secondly, are we really excited to see lots of Flash enabled intros for boring, company sites showing up when we search? Probably not - that’s why ’skip intro’ will soon be the most hated, yet competitive term on Google. Finally, now that Flash folk won’t have to create HTML versions of their sites for SEO purposes - will they still remember to do so for partially sighted visitors? Text to speech browsers are not highly optimized for reading Flash, and although in the UK this audience is supported by legislation this is not the case globally. Perhaps Adobe will also release their Flash ’search reading’ software to other companies that make text to speech browsers to help them out there - unless Google just offers it as an API of course. Click here to Skip intro.

Internet marketing guru Seth Godin has another insightful post on how to conceptualize your marketing offerings as five simple pieces: Data, Stories, Products (services), Interactions and Connection. I’d been thinking about the ’story’ (or myth) side of this equation for a while, but as usual Godin is four steps ahead of us all. Good stuff.