Excerpted from Neuromarketing:
One South African bank trying to boost their loan business...mailed 50,000 customers a loan offer, and used several variations in the direct mail package. First, the offers included a range of randomly selected interest rates - presumably, the interest rate (along with repayment terms) is by far the most important criteria for whether a loan offer is appealing. More significantly for our interests, the bank also included several “psychological features"...
There’s a lot of information in that study, but here’s the part that I found to be most startling:
For the male customers, replacing the photo of a male with a photo of female on the offer letter statistically significantly increases takeup; the effect is about as much as dropping the interest rate 4.5 percentage points… For female customers, we find no statistically significant patterns.
Overall, these results suggest a very powerful effect on male customers of seeing a female photo on the offer letter. Standard errors however do not allow us to isolate one specific mechanism for this effect. The effect on male customers may be due to either the positive impact of a female photo or the negative impact of a male photo.
I find it amazing that the effect of a mere photo of a woman on a loan offer was equivalent to nearly a 5% difference in the loan interest rate - a huge dfferential in the lending world.
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