As I said in my previous blog post, I’ve discovered a great website that summarizes recent Market Research so that marketers (and forward-thinking leaders) can make intelligent, data-based decisions.

This blog post is based on an article about pricing. If you’d like to read the article, feel free to subscribe and read it here. (BTW, I’m not affiliated with this site, just a big fan!)

Here’s my summary for you: the psychology of numbers is important and can affect people’s buying decisions. Why? Because all of our decision-making faculties are in the emotional part of the brain (neurologists discovered this over a decade ago), so it’s important to understand the emotions that drive decisions about price. 

Here are the results: People were willing to pay up to 3x more for a watch when the available product quantity was set to 1,001 pieces vs 1,000.

What?

It has to do with the psychology of scarcity.

“… You’re launching a limited-edition offer and you decided to create only 1,000 products. You’re sure it’s going to be a successful launch, (because) scarcity is a powerful persuasive tactic.

But what if there was a simple way to make it even more successful?

Science says adding a +1 to the limited quantity you’re offering can make people even more willing to buy.

• When people see numbers that slightly exceed a familiar boundary (e.g. 1,001 instead of 1,000), they are more likely to buy. 
• Across 9 experiments with 2,081 people, researchers found that when numbers slightly exceeded boundaries vs not (e.g. 1001 vs 1000):
  • People were willing to pay 219.5% more for a limited-edition watch
  • People were willing to pay 48.4% more for a product ranked in the top 101 of that category.
  • The proportion of people who chose a book titled “1,001 Places to See Before You Die” book increased by 33% (vs “1,000 Places”)
• The effect weakens as numbers get distant from the boundary (e.g. 105 vs 101).

What does this mean for marketers?

1. We get to think out of the box when it comes to everything from titles (of an article or a blog post) to pricing.
2. We get to TEST pricing to see what might make a difference that we hadn’t though would make a difference.
3. We get to share our knowledge about research like this with our clients, so that they are open to new ideas about numbers in their marketing.

If you enjoyed this post, I hope you’ll share it with others. Thanks!