Decoy marketing

This intriguing article discusses decoy marketing, a tactic marketers use to make their products look better by comparing them to inferior ones offered for a similar price. The author, Roger Dooley, discusses falling prey to this when shopping for shaving cream. First he stares at the shelf, trying to decide between dizzying numbers of options; then he sees that one variety has in its midst taller cans of the same product, but with 20% more for the same price. Instantly he buys, not one, but two of the bigger can, and goes on his way.

What happened? Essentially, his brain was tricked into redefining the situation. Instead of comparing several different products, his mind zeroed in on the very simple decision between products A and B, where they were identical except for the amount of product. This made the decision quick and easy: “B is the much better value!” and once the decision had been made, the other competitors had been eliminated without really considering their merits.

The key element here is that products A and B–the “real” product and the decoy–are almost identical except for the key difference that clinches the sale, in this case amount of product. Gentner and Markman (2006, Psychological Science) explain this forced easy decision this way:

[Comparing items] involves an alignment of structured representations yielding commonalities, differences related to the commonalities, and differences unrelated to the commonalities. One counterintuitive prediction of this view is that it should be easier to find the differences between pairs of similar items than to find the differences between pairs of dissimilar items. This prediction is particularly strong for differences that are related to the commonalities.

In other words, if two items are identical except for a couple of key points, it’s much easier to compare them (and thereby pick the non-decoy). And our brains are lazy. This laziness–among other things–is ripe for marketers to exploit to get us to buy their product. Decoy marketing works by exploiting one of the many shortcuts our brains like to take.