David Brooks Quotes

People don't buy for logical reasons. They buy for emotional reasons.

If Twitter genuinely wants users to buy things at scale, they have to give us a chance to consider the offers and make a decision in a matter of minutes/hours/days, not just seconds.

Buying involves decision-making. It's a performance activity, like sports or acting.

The first thing we looked at, in what case were people more likely to be attracted to the jar or jam, so in which case are people more likely to stop when they saw the display of jams and what we found was that more people stopped when there were 24 jams.

What is the hardest task in the world? To think.

About 60% of the people stopped when we had 24 jams on display and then at the times when we had 6 different flavors of jam out on display only 40% of the people actually stopped, so more people were clearly attracted to the larger varieties of options, but then when it came down to buying, so the second thing we looked at is in what case were people more likely to buy a jar of jam. What we found was that of the people who stopped when there were 24 different flavors of jam out on display only 3% of them actually bought a jar of jam whereas of the people who stopped when there were 6 different flavors of jam 30% of them actually bought a jar of jam.

We either put out 6 different flavors of jam or 24 different flavors of jam and we looked at 2 things. First, in what case were people more likely to buy a jar of jam?

I like to buy things I can understand. I do a lot of research on things.

To act is easy; to think is hard.

The typical American reports making about 70 [choices] in a typical day.

Asking, "How much is it?" is THE BIGGEST buying signal. Telling me, "Your price is too high." is THE SECOND BIGGEST buying signal

When you give people too many choices it makes them hesitate and not buy stuff.

We also don't always know what we want. And in those cases it can actually make us worse off because it's actually easier to figure out what you want and to figure out how the options differ if you have about a handful of them than if you have a hundred of them.

I don't believe in asking people to spend $15 on something they've never heard before. That's just unreasonable.

Consumers do not buy products. They buy product benefits.

One quarter of what you buy will turn out to be mistakes.

What I've found is there is no barometer that allows you to chart when you're oversaturating a desire. You're left really trying to respond on a gut level, because by the time you might do research, it's already too late. There's also a healthy tension between what are very sound business objectives and a very amorphous desire to preserve what's special.

Visiting stores and testing products is one of the critical elements of the analyst's job.

I have a hard time memorizing stuff. I'm always in the process of writing a new song, so trying to learn a new one takes a minute.

To most people, nothing is more troublesome than the effort of thinking.

Dudley thought for a moment. It looked like hard work.

In fact, even in that store Draeger's they had 348 different kinds of jam actually in the jam aisle. And what we found over about, say, 10 years of research is that as the number of choices actually increase people are less likely to make a choice and sometimes they do this even when it's really bad for them.

A man with an obsession is a man who has very little sales resistance.

Three minutes thought would suffice to find this out; but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time.

The more a prospective customer clicks on you and your stuff, the easier it is for them to make a buying decision in your favor.