Stop in a service station. Inside, a multitude of chips.
You can’t resist, you want them: do you choose the brand or the price?
Obviously, I’m assuming a compulsive purchase, or the typical whim of a child bored by three hours of car with iPad unloaded. So, let’s not go into details of the possible differences between a product and the other: a potato chip is potato chip …
Look at this picture taken in a service station:
1 tube of AAA = € 2.99
On the right the BBB brand, less known (to me), which maybe does not offer exactly the same type of product but is positioned in the same category as the first (both for the tube packaging and for the exposure next to the market leader).
1 tube of BBB = € 1.99
I ask the question again: do you choose the brand or the price?
Personally, I would have chosen the brand product, for various reasons:
– I can’t find any difference between the two products;
– I know the AAA brand;
– Since I know it, I also think it’s the best;
– and the tube costs more precisely because it is a better product and is branded;
– so, I gratify myself with the best potato chips.
The average consumer makes his choices this way, doesn’t he?
However, while I carry out the usual attempts to deter (“don’t eat now or you won’t eat at lunch”, “come on”, “I said no”, etc..), the professional deformation is triggered.
So, I get closer to the colourful display of tubes of chips.
And I discover something interesting, look here:
Let’s compare the two products with the new elements:
1 AAA tube = € 2.99 for 165 grams = 1.81 €cent per gram
1 BBB tube = € 1.99 per 100 grams = 1.99 €cent per gram
So, based on the net weight, I eventually find that the AAA product costs as much as 10% LESS than the lesser-known product!
Private Final of the story:
“Well, take these damn chips, but woe betide you if you don’t eat at lunch…”
And of course, the hand goes to the AAA branded product, which would have been chosen anyway, without all my marketer-on-holiday doubts.
Business considerations:
The Marketing Director or whoever decided on the packaging of the BBB product was clever.
Isn’t the AAA brand, market leader, leaving a profit in the display? Wouldn’t it have the “right” to cost more instead of less?
Or was there some special promotion in progress? Or is there behind a commercial strategy of the service station?
I’d be really curious to know how many AAA tubes and how many BBBs will have been sold by the end of the day…
Useful lesson for us:
If you are a market leader: can you charge a premium price?
If you are not a market leader: can you repackage your offer to be commercially aggressive and profitable at the same time?
P.S.:
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