How can price tags ‘trick’ consumers into buying expensive items?
This time, the author will share about the ‘decoy effect’ technique in marketing.
Decoy effect is a great marketing strategy in business. This strategy seems to be able to amaze buyers while they are planning to save.
Unconsciously, most users have fallen into the trap of decoy effect.
So, what exactly is meant by decoy effect? Decoy effect is a change of choice between two options after the third option appears.
Understood? If you still don't understand, continue your reading.
Take an example like this. Usually if we go to watch a movie, it is obligatory to buy corn cobs. Assume that the price of small -sized corn husks is RM3 while large -sized corn is RM7.
Often, if there are two such options, consumers will choose small -sized cornstarch but a business must want to make a profit and want us to buy large -sized cornstarch.
What does the company do? They put the third option which is a medium -sized corn husk priced at only RM6.50 to lure consumers.
Consumers will apparently consider buying large -sized corn cobs after seeing the price between large and medium -sized corn cobs is not much different. The situation makes the more expensive items seem more worthwhile and save to buy.
So here, the company uses medium -sized popcorn as a ‘decoy’ to entice consumers to buy it.
Let's take another example. Imagine you want to buy a car. You have the option of buying a car that costs RM30,000 or RM40,000.
However, the car priced at RM30,000 did not have leather seats while the car priced at RM40,000 had leather seats.
After that, the car center salesman came to you and offered a car priced at RM50,000 but he told me the car did not have leather seats.
So, you know what that means? The salesman wants to tell you to buy a car worth RM40,000 because it has leather seats whereas before that you were very interested in buying a car worth RM30,000.
The salesman uses the RM50,000 car as 'bait' so that you are influenced.
You have certainly experienced situations like the above especially in shopping malls or e-commerce sites. Most importantly, determine your budget before shopping.
