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Compare And Contrast Duhigg And Gladwells

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Have you ever wondered why retailers have you leaving with more items than you intended to have? It is all because the marketing strategies that have been outlined in the stores that the consumers don’t even notice. In the texts, Power of Habit: Why We Do What We do in Life by Charles Duhigg and The Science of Shopping, Malcolm Gladwell explain how companies target consumer shopping habits and the significance of marketing. While reading through Duhigg and Gladwells texts, I had made a trip to Target and analyzed how they strategically market to their consumers and discovered that they are very effective in employing the Invariant right, shopping gender gap, sandwiching and Guest I.D.’s. One of the most effective strategies is the Invariant …show more content…

According to Duhigg, sandwiching is the idea that for something to become familiar it should be blended in with a couple others items that are actually familiar. Duhigg had related this strategy with a new song that came out in the summer of 2003 called “Hey Ya” by the hip-hop group Outkast. Many radio stations had played this song over and over again with many other popular songs during that time such as “Breathe” by Blu Cantrell. These songs became sticky which caused many people to dislike it. Sticky songs are what people expect to hear on the radio. Some stations did research by calling listeners and playing a snippet of the song which causes them to say “I’ve heard that a million times, I’m already tired of it”. However, duhigg states that “are brains crave familiarity in music because familiarity is how we manage to hear without becoming distracted to all the sound”. (85). This allows the listeners to happily sit through the whole song even if they do not like it because it seems familiar to them. Target uses this strategy very effectively on pregnant women because of the catalogs they receive. Duhigg had said “by dressing something in old clothes and the making the unfamiliar seem familiar.” (85) The catalogs that target send out to expectant mothers are blended with random items so each of them are almost

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