Anchoring

I came across this interesting discussion of a psychological technique.

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GP: Wait. What’s an anchor?

OPERATIVE: Damnit. Maybe I should have given more background. Can I just send you this background, technical stuff?

GP: Why don’t you, is there a lot of it? I mean, is this real technical or what?

OPERATIVE: Not to me it’s not, but maybe to others. Let’s just go. Anchor is a psychological term. Sales people use it all the time. They’ll show you a really big number. Billions and billions served, stuff like that. You’re mind’s now anchored on a big number, so when they ask for two dollars for a burger, it sounds like nothing.

GP: Okay, I get it.

OPERATIVE: Yeah, it’s pretty neat. I know of a study where they had two different menus in the same restaurant. Random. But they tracked which customers got which menu. The menus were exactly the same except for one thing. One menu listed items in a sort of random order or by the type of entrée or whatever. The other menu listed the exact same items, but within each category, appetizer, salads, entrees, deserts, et cetera, everything was listed from the most expensive to the cheapest. They wanted to test how much anchoring worked on a menu since people tend to read from top to bottom.

GP: What happened?

OPERATIVE: People who ordered from the test menu ordered by price spent almost twice as much as the people with the randomly ordered menu. It totally worked.

GP: Wow.


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