Insert Large Numbers Near Prices

Customers evaluate prices by comparing them to other numbers.

For example, a street vendor switched the price of their sweatshirt between $10 and $80 every 30 minutes. When the sweatshirt was $80, customers bought more CDs at an adjacent vendor because the CDs seemed cheaper (Nunes & Boatwright, 2004).

Anchoring works with any number.

In another study, people reflected on the last two digits of their social security number. If these digits were high, they paid higher prices in a subsequent task (Ariely et al., 2003).

Therefore, show any high numbers near your price:

• Join 2,500 happy customers
• Earn 5,000 reward points
• Lasts for 10,000 hours

Anchoring is flexible. Customers will:

• Shift decimals
• Add or remove zeroes
• Remove negative signs

Consider 099 and 1999.

Which anchor is a better for a restaurant meal?

It depends:

• 1999 was better near a single meal because it primed $19.99
• 099 was better near a full bill because it primed $99

(see Koçaş & Dogerlioglu-Demir, 2020).

Ideas

• Insert Large Bulk Quantities. Customers prefer a large quantity before the price (e.g., 70 items for $29; Bagchi & Davis, 2012). Like this example from an app:

Caveats

• Add Visual Contrast. Large numbers need visual contrast (e.g., different color) so that your price will polarize away from it (i.e., $10 moves away from 50) instead of assimilating with it (e.g., $10 converges with 50 if these two numbers look visually similar).

• Adaval, R., & Monroe, K. B. (2002). Automatic construction and use of contextual information for product and price evaluations. Journal of Consumer Research, 28(4), 572- 588.
• Ariely, D., Loewenstein, G., & Prelec, D. (2003). “Coherent arbitrariness”: Stable demand curves without stable preferences. The Quarterly journal of economics, 118(1), 73-106.
• Bagchi, R., & Davis, D. F. (2012). 29for70itemsor70itemsfor 29? How presentation order affects package perceptions. Journal of Consumer Research, 39(1), 62-73.
• Dogerlioglu-Demir, K., & Koçaş, C. (2015). Seemingly incidental anchoring: the effect of incidental environmental anchors on consumers’ willingness to pay. Marketing Letters, 26, 607-618.
• Coulter, K. S., & Coulter, R. A. (2005). Size does matter: The effects of magnitude representation congruency on price perceptions and purchase likelihood. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 15(1), 64-76.
• Koçaş, C., & Dogerlioglu-Demir, K. (2020). The 1 in 1,000,000: Context effects of how numbers cue different kinds of incidental environmental anchoring in marketing communications. Journal of Business Research, 109, 536-544.
• Nunes, J. C., & Boatwright, P. (2004). Incidental prices and their effect on willingness to pay. Journal of Marketing Research, 41(4), 457-466.