Study Shows Consumers’ Buying Habits Change As Deadlines Approach

Market researchers recruited hundreds of college students for a series of experiments to see how their tastes changed as deadlines approached. One such experiment was to demonstrate that consumers’ perspective of time to decide affects purchasing decisions.

In the experiment, students facing midterm examinations received sales pitches from a fictitious tutoring service with one of two messages — either that exams were “soon,” “only a week away” or “still a full week away.” The tutoring service gave them two choices: avoid failure, or more ambitious goals with the catch phrase “Ace every class!”