When it comes to shopping for groceries, we need all of the help we can get. Rising prices and reduced coupon values make reducing your grocery bill by 70 percent a thing of the past. And those grocery stores have plenty of tricks up their sleeves to get you to buy the products they want you to buy and to buy as many of them as they need you to do. We’ve been going over the different strategies these stores use to grab your shopping dollar, Now here is a really sneaky one.
Marketing research shows that when someone is presented with three similar products with three similar price points (marketing talk for pricing range), most consumers will “know” that the best deal is the middle one. Shoppers won’t even bother doing any research, they will just see that middle product as the best in terms of value.
The grocery stores know all about this phenomena. They will purposely put the product they want to sell (the one that is most profitable to them) and surround it on either side with higher priced and lower priced products.
Let’s say that they want to push a certain brand of pasta, such as Barillo. They will put a higher priced product, such as Barillo Plus on the left and a lower priced product, such as the store brand on the right. Boom you reach for the regular Barillo in most cases, even if there the higher priced Barillo Plus actually contains more pasta making it a better deal, or the store brand is cheaper.
The next time you are in the store, take a look at some products and see if this is so. Obviously, it won’t apply to every product, but chances are that if they are pushing a product elsewhere in the store, such as on an end-cap display, they will employ this strategy in the middle of the shelves.
Mary Ann Romans.
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