To Sell More, Follow the Show
What do shoes, wine, and spies all have to do with selling products?
If it were a James Bond movie, the answer would be obvious. However, it’s not a James Bond movie. Rather this is about Russian spies trimming the hydrangeas, wine with fancy labels, and Palessi Shoes (https://www.palessishoes.com):
Several years ago, the New York Times reported on Russian spies living in New Jersey and sending information back to Russia. It’s not entirely clear why they were doing that as the information they had access to was available to anyone who listened to the news. Their neighbors were quite surprised when the spies were arrested, with one person commenting that her neighbor couldn’t be a spy because of “what she did with the hydrangeas.” I assume the reference was to killing bugs instead of planting them.
A group of wine experts were asked to review two wines. The first wine was presented in bottles with cheap, peeling labels. The experts panned the wine. The second wine was in fancy bottles with beautiful labels. Naturally, everyone loved that wine. Of course, it was all the same wine; only the bottle changed.
Finally, Payless Shoes famously opened “Palessi,” a fancy, upscale shoe store where they charged $600 dollars for shoes that normally sold for $20. The invited fashion experts were all fooled.
What this all goes to show is that context is a very powerful influence on perceptions. The context determines what we expect: spies don’t trim hydrangeas in a New Jersey suburb, so of course someone trimming hydrangeas in New Jersey can’t be a spy; wine from expensive looking bottles seems to taste better because the appearance of the bottle changes our expectations of the wine inside; and naturally the shoes in a fancy, upscale store are going to be very expensive. In each of these cases, the context set the tone.
In none of these cases was this halo effect an accident. The spies wanted to blend in, in way that James Bond never does. They made use of people’s expectations in order to divert suspicion. The wine was an experiment investigating manifestations of the halo effect.
The shoes, though, were quite brilliant. Sure, Payless got to have some fun with fashion critics and generate a lot of free advertising, but that was only the beginning. Payless actually accomplished two other things: First, they demonstrated the people were willing to pay $600 for their shoes, a powerful statement of value. Second, they created a contrast between their shoes at $600 and the same shoes at $20. Contrast is a powerful technique, one that appears central to our brains process information. Contrast creates a context in which we evaluate information and experiences. In the context of people willing to pay $600, those $20 shoes suddenly become much more likely to seem like an incredible bargain. As an added bonus, Payless shoppers get to feel smug and superior to the fashion critics who paid 30x more for the shoes. Very clever indeed.
While there are many ways to convince people that your products or services are a good deal for the money, as they (almost) said in Monty Python’s Life of Brian: Follow the shoes!
