Tag: loss aversion

Buy Now Pay Later: why it works

The number of times I come across mentions of Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) has dramatically increased and became ubiquitous in both brick and mortal businesses and the digital landscape in last 6 months. The BNPL concept is based on good repayment behaviour, in exchange for affordable purchases, through flexible payment plans. The market value of BNPL platforms such as  Klarna, Afterpay and Sezzle is projected to rise globally at a CAGR of 21.2% by 2027. 

Little bit of context for Southeast Asia. Out of the over 670 million people in the region, only 27% of the population have bank accounts. This sizable gap in banking penetration results in approximately 438 million unbanked individuals, with no bank account, credit or debit card or access to lines of credit. In parallel, there has been a shifting trend away from bank accounts and credit cards to services like BNPL, especially in younger consumers, due to debt aversion and ease of use. Hence, BNPL’s huge appeal.

The concept of BNPL is not new. Yet it is becoming increasingly popular and utilised due to a combination of factors, which include how humans are built as well as #COVID19 imposed restrictions (we have lot of spare time, are unable to travel and go shopping and feel the urge to online shop as a means of compensating), among others.

Here we review the main behavioural and psychological factors that drive BNPL:

1) Lose aversion

2) Present bias

Loss aversion

Research has found that spending money triggers areas of the brain associated with pain and disgust and that different forms of payment trigger different levels of discomfort. The pain of making a payment depends on the amount to be paid and on the method by which payment is made. Consumers who paid by credit cards rather than cash seem to experience less of a pain and hence were more willing to incur a given expense. As cash represents a physical representation of value, we feel more pain as people literally see themselves losing money.

Credit cards can be considered a prototype to BNPL as they use the same premise, albeit the only difference is paying the total price at a later date. Paying with credit cards provides a smooth transactional process, essentially decoupling the pain of losing their money in exchange for a product as there is no real money counting/giving process. An MIT study looking at purchasing tickets to a basketball game found that card-paying students were willing to pay twice as much as cash-paying students. Payment via credit cards is perceived as parting with a lower monetary value.

In both cases, the pain is linked to loss aversion, which is the tendency to prefer avoiding losses to acquiring equivalent gains. E-commerce companies are particularly adept at this, and constantly create urgency, offer deadlines for discounts and other ways of creating a psychological phenomenon of FOMO.

In brief, we are built to avoid pain by all means, which, in our daily lives, is recurrent phenomenon every time we pay via cash or credit cards. Perception of payment sometime later feels less painful.

Present bias

We humans are built to be focused/biased in present. We value $100 more today then tomorrow, less the day after and even less in future. In other words, present bias represent that fact that people place a greater value on goods/income achieved in the present moment – rather than receiving the same goods/income in the future. It suggests given a choice between a payoff today and a pay off in the future; we will choose to have the pay off now.

The timing of payments impacts the perceived value of a product. For example, people that pay for gym memberships monthly are more likely to exercise and renew their memberships compared to those that pay annually. These services provide a balance between pain and the perceived value/connection to the product. The focus shifts towards paying in future via smaller instalments, which are perceived as appealing and more affordable. As a result of tangible cash being abstracted away from us, it is harder to resist our impulse not to shop/consume via BNPL.

The BNPL business model is heavily relying on payment in future in various industries. Flexible options from ‘buy now, stay later‘ hotelier packages supporting Asian tourism, to car manufacturers’ deferred payment plans for boosting car sales, all the way to ‘fly now, pay later‘ air travel are increasingly popular.

You may ask what is the result of these two phenomena combined? Studies show that tourists (and pretty much any anyone) with high loss aversion and high present bias are more likely to overspend.

Investor’s perspective: psychology of fundraising

“A compelling narrative fosters an illusion of inevitability.” 
― Daniel Kahneman

Most successful investors in the world have a good understanding of common human (cognitive) biases. Cognitive biases are ‘hard-wired’ in us, and we are all liable to take shortcuts, oversimplify complex decisions and be overconfident in our decision-making process. Thanks to these (intuitive or experience-based) insights, investors have a significantly better understanding of investment opportunities (founding teams and their projects) and are able to systematically use these (behavioural) insights for better decision making, thus improving their investment odds.

There are three aspects for investors to consider in order to select only the best investment opportunities:

  1. Identify and guard against biases in their own (investment-related) decision-making process
  2. Identify biases [paste link to the entrepreneur’s perspective post here] entrepreneurs may use (in their materials/deck/pitching process) to gain a more favourable view of their projects
  3. Identify and assess founders’ biases by observing how/what they pitch

Successful investor puts looks at opportunities via each set of lenses (from above three points) before deciding to invest.

1) Identify and guard against biases in their own decision-making process

  • Confirmation Bias + Loss Aversion. What is it: This is the tendency for people to favor information that confirms their preconceptions regardless of whether that information is true or complete. When layered in with Loss Aversion, it creates a deadly combination. How to defend against it: Because an investor is averse to losses, he is biased against any data that suggests that the initial investment decision was a mistake and will gravitate towards information that supports a follow-on investment. Confirmation-trapped people often seek out others who have made, and are still making, the same mistake.
  • Risk Seeking. What is it: Even if a company is really struggling, the following logic is very appealing: wouldn’t an investor be willing to spend $2M to save the last $8M he has already invested? Because investors usually buy preferred stock, they get paid first and so they only need the company to sell for the value of the preferred stock to get their money back. How to defend against it: As a result, you often see struggling companies raise inside rounds under this logic (often crushing employees’ equity in the process). Basically, investors avoid risk when their portfolios are performing well and could bear more, and they seek risk when their portfolios are floundering and don’t need more exposure to possible losses. This is largely due to the mentality of winning it all back. Investors are willing to raise the stakes to “reclaim” capital, but not to create more capital.

Other impactful biases include:

  • Delayed gratification (pressure to show immediate results)
  • Sunk cost trap (feeling lasting attachment to costs that cannot be recovered)
  • Oversimplification tendency (tendency to stay within your ‘circle of competence’ even when it is clearly counterproductive or destructive)

2) Identify biases founders use to gain more favourable view of their projects

As mentioned in the article, top biases that founders may deliberately use to gain more favourable view of their pitch and project are narrative bias (storytelling in deck and pitching), clustering illusion (that causes investors to observe appealing clusters of information and credentials), confirmation bias (founder shows the ‘right’ structure and contents to investors), pro-innovation bias (investors like to see innovative features and products), halo effect (founders show, via storytelling and credentials, a positive and likeable image or treat of themselves or their product, aiming for investors to think that the overall product and team are as good), zero-risk effect (founders pre-emptively show there are no risks or all potential risks are mitigated) and distinction bias (founders like to deliberately compare their product to one that is much inferior, thus highlighting the benefits).

3) Identify and assess founders’ biases by observing their pitch

  1. Anchoring Trap. What is it: We can be excessively influenced by a starting point or first impression. Psychologists have shown that when people make quantitative estimates, their estimates may be heavily influenced by previous values of the item. For example, it is not an accident that a used-car salesman always starts negotiating with a high price and then works down. The salesman is trying to get the consumer anchored on the high price so that when he offers a lower price, the consumer will estimate that the lower price represents a good value. Anchoring can cause investors to under-react to new information. How to defend against it: In order to avoid this trap, an investor needs to remain flexible in his thinking and open to new sources of information, while understanding the reality that any company can be here today and gone tomorrow.
  2. False Causality Bias. What is it: Many times, we falsely assume when two events occur together that one event must have caused the other. For example, founders are prone to show and quickly get credit for their previous success (exit or company sale). However upon careful analysis of the stated “success” (which a founder assumes to repeat with this new project) may show a confluence of external factors (such as technological development, favourable legislation, government support, etc), good timing and pure luck that were more important in the stated success. PayPal and Amazon are great examples, and founders of both are very careful not to claim full credit, but deliberate on more salient factors that weren’t in their control and how the sum total of their grit, perseverance and external factors helped in their eventual success. How to defend against it: Investors need to hear out founders’ stories but also conduct a thorough analysis of the context in which the previous success of the founder happened. Goal is to distill what really caused the success; was it mostly the hard work, visionary idea and perseverance despite or rather in addition to externalities?
  3. Fundamental Attribution Error. What is it: Whereby we attribute a person’s behaviour to an intrinsic quality of her identity rather than a situation she is in. For example, let’s say you were interviewing a financial advisor. He shows up on time, in a nice suit, and buys lunch. He says all the right words. Will he handle your money correctly? Almost all of us would be led to believe he would, reasoning that his sharp appearance, timeliness, and generosity point towards his “good character”. Dan Ariely’s book about situational dishonesty and cheating illustrates that we may give an appearance that is expected only to behave differently in a similar context. How to defend against it: Before and during the fundraising pitch, we need to dig deeper and put appearances and our expectation in a proper context, aiming to find out whether the founder and his team really have all the necessary attributes (industry knowledge, team skills, leadership, vision for the product) required to give them the best shot at successful growth and scale up of their product.
  4. Survivorship Bias. What is it: Our tendency to focus on successful people, businesses, or strategies and ignoring those that failed.  Because of this, we adopt opinions, structure businesses, and make decisions without examining all the data, which can easily lead to failure. A Google search of “Successful founders who dropped out of college,” will turn up some of the biggest names such as Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg as examples of entrepreneurs who had an idea, took a leap and became successful. But by equating their success to hard work alone, we ignore a very important fact: for every successful college dropout, there are hundreds, if not thousands, who weren’t as lucky.
    The founders we put on pedestals worked hard, but there were also many circumstantial events that paved their way to success. In fact, research shows the majority of the United States’ most successful businesspeople graduated college – 94%, to be exact. How to defend against it: Look out for signs such as “In following legendary footsteps of XXX,” “We have some of the similar pedigree to YYY,” “Our team’s combined experiences in this industry are of ZZZ years”, etc which all have a common denominator of “based on previous success of such and such, we think we have a good chance at similar success.” Again, a more pragmatic assessment of team, product and market related to areas where the founder or his team claims some “heavy” credentials would help understand what the reality is.

In addition to the above, biases investors can look out for in founders include:

  • Information bias
  • Framing cognitive bias
  • Decoy effect
  • Choice supportive bias
  • Empathy gap
  • Illusion of control
  • Overconfidence and overoptimism
  • Scarcity priming

Top 5 psychology tricks in sales

1. Give your prospect fewer options

Providing your prospect with too many different options makes it harder for them to make a decision – which increases the odds they’ll walk away without buying anything at all. This is due to what in psychology is called choice overload.

2. Leverage loss aversion and FOMO

Even hesitant buyers have a hard time saying no to a great opportunity – especially if they’re thinking about what they’ll lose by turning it down. You can tap into this by framing your offer as something they’ll miss out on if they don’t make a purchase, rather than just highlighting the added value. Very impactful is to make positive comparison with a competitor, which makes your offer stand out even further.

3. Ask hesitant prospects to explain their reasoning

One of the easiest ways to poke holes in a prospect’s excuse for not buying is to ask to them walk you through their reasoning.

A simple, “What’s holding you back?” can get prospects to open up about their reservations. Whether it’s a matter of budget, timing, or product fit, knowing your prospect’s sales objections gives you a chance to reframe their perspective.

Another method is to ask your prospect to rate their readiness to buy on a scale of one to ten (with one being “not ready at all” and ten being “completely ready”). Regardless of their answer, ask why they chose the number they did.

4. Use storytelling to make an impact

Sharing a relatable customer success story is more powerful than simply listing the benefits of your product. Not only does telling a story allow you to connect more quickly with your prospects (by releasing the “trust hormone” oxytocin), it also helps you motivate your audience to take a desired action.

5. Use extreme anchoring
Anchoring is so powerful that it works even when you know it’s being done to you. You’re better off setting a high anchor that skews the entire negotiation your way than letting the client set a low anchor. The anchor serves as the mental reference point throughout the negotiation. Studies have shown that the higher the anchor, the higher the final price.