Keynote Speaker and Magician. Psychology TALKS: Magic SHOWS

Articles tagged with: compare

Marketers love you to compare.

Steve Cantwell November 6th, 2018 Uncategorized

Marketers love you to compare.

Imagine you have invented a new gadget and put it into the shops at $279. As it is a completely new product, there is nothing to compare it with. How can anyone judge whether that is a good price or not? The answer is, they cannot.

This is the problem Williams-Sonoma had when they produced a bread maker and tried to sell it for $279. It wasn’t selling well because people couldn’t tell if that was a good price or not. To solve this problem the company introduced another bread maker. This one had more controls and could do a little more, but was priced much higher at $429. Now people had something with which to compare. The first bread maker was $150 cheaper. Sure, it wasn’t quite as flashy, but it made bread. $279 now seemed like a good price and the product started selling much better.

Imagine now that you are in a restaurant and you see the lobster thermidor, their flagship dish, costs $120. You may rule that out straight away as far too expensive. You then see their fillet steak is $60. That is far cheaper and you may be tempted to choose that. Perhaps, if you had not seen how expensive the lobster was, you may have considered $60 to be too steep for a cut of beef.

You are powerless against your minds determination to compare. The menu has set an anchor of $120 for the lobster, and against that the beef, which actually is still expensive, appears good value.

Find out more about how the mind plays tricks on you and how your memory works by reading my books, Bias Beware and Memory Matters.

You just cannot help comparing.

Steve Cantwell November 2nd, 2018 Uncategorized

You just cannot help comparing.

If you want to judge a quality such as its attractiveness, the only way to do it is by comparison. You find something similar and decide which is the most attractive. Unless you have a clear-cut, objective way of measuring what you have to judge, you simply have to seek out something with which to compare that which you are valuing.

Kenrick and Gutierres asked male college students to rate the photographs of a bunch of potential dates. Some of them were asked to do this just before watching an episode of Charlie’s Angels, and some were asked just after watching it. Those men who had not just watched Farrah Fawcett and Jacklyn Smith running around after a load of baddies rated the potential dates pretty much as any other men would.

However, those who had just watched those beautiful crime fighters with their perfect faces and immaculate hair now had higher standards. They couldn’t help but compare these new photos with the goddesses they had just been drooling over. The potential dates were therefore rated as much less attractive.

In the past we were not exposed to many different people. Hundreds of years ago, a person would only meet the few potential mates in his own or neighbouring villages. Even a hundred years ago people would only see their few acquaintances plus a few grainy photos in newspapers and magazines. Then along came TV and we were exposed to many more beauties, beginning to distort our view of how attractive the average person is. And then came airbrushing, and the internet. Now everywhere we look we are exposed to impossible perfection. We may no longer be happy with what we have because our view of average has been skewed by this exposure.

Find out more about how the mind plays tricks on you and how your memory works by reading my books, Bias Beware and Memory Matters.