Have you ever thought why the prices of some clothes are 399,499,999 etc but not 400, 500, 1000.Is it the difference of one rupee which makes the difference or is it something else to do with your brains.
Each and every person in the world is unique but the loopholes of our brain make all the difference. Let’s play a game. In the Fig 1 you find two green circles, one surrounded with the larger grey circles and other with smaller ones. Which one of them do you think is bigger? If you have gone with the left one then you backed the wrong horse. Right circle isn’t the correct one too. A joyful hand goes to those who say both are of same size (Fig 2). Why this happened? It’s the charisma of persistence of vision and our mazy brain.
Fig 1
The same technique is employed in marketing which is called as the Decoy effect. It is the phenomenon where by consumers will tend to have a specific change in preference between two options when also presented with a third option that is a symmetrically dominated.
Fig 2
To capture the meaning of decoy effect perfectly,let’s play another game. Suppose you are in the theatre. It’s interval time and you are fond of popcorn. Now a days, good taste in the theatre is only in the popcorn. Suppose you get them in two different sized packets, a smaller and a bigger one. [Refer Fig 3].
Fig 3
Vote your choice. Most of the people will choose the smaller one which is of Rs 10 and just 5% will go with bigger one.
Fig 4
Now to increase the sales of bigger ones marketers introduce a new product called as the decoy product which is the medium sized popcorn [refer fig 4]. You will find that the medium sized popcorn is priced at Rs 25 and most people tend to buy the bigger one thinking that the difference between the medium one and bigger one which is just Rs 5 doesn’t make any difference to their pockets. This is how, marketers make huge profits. So people just remember this and act wisely when buying anything.