What?! Champagne and caviar again?
Can’t we ever have something special?!
Psychologists have conducted the following experiment with rats:
In the rat’s exciting day-to-day life, they’re given a choice between food or pleasurable stimulation such a drug. Like your run-of-the-mill hardcore junkie, they end up forgetting all about eating while hitting up the drug again and again.
Then, the psychologist give the rats the choice of a new brain stimulation and found the rats may prefer the new stimulant over their regular one.
But, the rats won’t choose that new preferred drug more frequently than their regular one.
Instead, they hit the new stuff only occasionally while sticking with the regular drug day in and day out. Like drinking beer all year long, then breaking out the expensive 50-year-old scotch in the locked liquor cabinet only to celebrate a big business transaction or momentous personal accomplishment.
Now, I know we’re not rats, at least those of us not running “too-big-to-fail” banks or “Beyond Petroleum” energy companies. Yet there’s a quick lesson here in response rates we can apply in interpreting your customers’ behavior in your marketing:
| Response Rates do not predict choice: customers and prospects may choose their preferred area least frequently — they won’t always choose their most frequent choice. |
A good way to see this is through a simple list of examples to give you different angles and some food for thought to get your mental gears revving:
- You eat your regular monthly menu of Italian, Chinese, Mexican, and American every night (high frequency) then go dining occasionally and choose something entirely different, such as French or Ethiopian cuisine (low frequency)
- If you’re offering an upmarket version of a product, your customers may prefer you but not choose you very often – even if their budget is absolutely unlimited. Many people worldwide can easily afford and quietly prefer a Rolls Royce but use a Mercedes, Lexus, or Infiniti for their daily needs
- Here’s one I found a non-marketing book about turning the special into the ordinary:
If you went to your neighbor’s house next Friday at noon and give him $1000, he’d be delighted. Let’s say you repeat this for the next nine weeks. By doing so, you establish a status quo of expectations. And by now, your neighbor has budgeted the free money into his overall life. On the 10th Friday, without a word, you decide not to make the gift, so you don’t show up. Your decision would cause a negative reaction. More than likely he would call you undependable and a dirty cheat, for you have tampered with his survival mechanism - And you may know I collect books: I have a special sealed bookcase just for the rarest of the rare in my library
This little psychology lesson can even be applied to how you’ve positioned your products and your company itself: to understand why your competitors are raking in the cash falling from the money trees while you’re not.
If you take something occasional and special and experience it more frequently, it turns into the ordinary and then into the expected. Champagne and caviar every night become utterly boring.
A very fancy mustard established themselves years ago as upscale and occasional (watch the video now to see if you remember this one):
But now you can get Grey Poupon’s finer pleasures in Costco quantities:
|
You at Costco: “Pardon me, but would you have any Grey Poupon?”
Employee: “But of course … Aisle 7 and it’s on sale, dude: 1 gallon for a buck.” |
So instead of doing these:
- featuring discounted price (Grey Poupon: now in 52-gallon drums!)
- novelty approaches that gets attention but which wears out fast (the bikini girl or boy on the free calendar from your auto parts distributor) or
- free logo-branded pens and keychains with every bottle of Moet Champagne or XO Cognac to boost brand awareness …
… see if your lower response rates are because your customers consider your products to be special and only for occasions. If so, jack up your prices.
WHAT’S NEXT? We revisit Eternal Marketing’s social engineering in understanding peer groups and peer pressure where you can harness some deeply imbedded desires common to us all as humans … then focus on psychology applied to the online world.
Find out next time as we continue to chart the underlying currents of psychology, sociology, and economics that flow together as marketing.
In DEEP MARKETING.
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