Dr. Dan Ariely has landed quiet a hit with “Predictably Irrational”. His name keeps popping up in different places.

Just recently I read about how internet marketers use some of his techniques to get more of their customers to buy their products.

A popular trade magazine offers a subscription to it’s online version for $47, a print subscription for $97 and a combined online & print subscription for $99.

Now looking at it with nothing but “common sense” - it makes absolutely no sense to offer the print-only subscription. Nobody’s gonna go for print-only just to save $2. I guess even people who don’t have an email account would pay $2 more for the “online version”.

But they do offer this “silly” $97 print-only subscription for a reason: because they found that more people purchase the online & print combination than if they only offer the online subscription for $47 and the print & online subscription for $99.

Now does this make any sense LOGICALLY?

Nope.

But LOGIC is usually not the discipline salespeople excell in. And logic has very little to do with persuasion and influencing.

Direct marketers also know that sometimes when they test their prices and sell a product that they have been selling for $27 for the price of $37 people might actually buy more. So they might have had a 2% response rate at $27 and a 2.7% response rate at $37.

Because, to put it in simple words: If it’s so cheap, it can’t be really good. And if it costs that much, it must be really good!

Now, for a marketer there probably can’t be anything sweeter than raising the price and selling more merchandise. Or putting in a “pseudo-offer” and all of the sudden having more people buy your premium-priced product.

But this is a big lesson when it comes to understanding human nature. Because when people tell you what they like with their hard-earned money, that is much more viable information than when they tell you what they like by filling out a survey.