It was the week before Christmas. Every other week when you went round the supermarket you were always attracted to the wine offers that were under £4.00. Every week you told yourself that at this supermarket they were able to maintain quality and keep costs low because they purchased quality wine in bulk, and you really could get a good bottle of red for £3.99. Really, you could.
But it was the week before Christmas. Wintervale. The season of pagan indulgence and celebration. You had already moved money from your savings account into your current account in a desperate attempt to survive the impending credit card tsunami. You had already saved a pound or two by recycling some of last year’s unwanted gifts and you had got used to being extravagant. Now was the time to lash out one more time. £5.99 on a bottle of Bordeaux. You wouldn’t normally spend that much, but hey, this was Christmas, and a bit of recklessness was occasionally permitted.
And of course, when you drank it with the obligatory post Christmas beef, it was wonderful. So much better than that £3.99 stuff. So rich and velvety. So smooth. It really was worth paying the extra. I mean the £3.99 wine was excellent, but the £5.99 one was out of this world.
That experience would come as no surprise to researchers from the California Institute of Technology and the Stanford Graduate School of Business who found that $90 wine tastes much better than the same wine priced at $10. Because we expect wines that cost more to be of higher quality, we trick ourselves into believing the wines provide a more pleasurable experience than less expensive ones. When 20 adult test subjects sampled the same wine at different prices, they reported experiencing pleasure at significantly greater levels when told the wine cost more. At the same time, the part of the brain responsible for pleasure showed significant activity.
Their study, published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, says that with the higher priced wines, we have greater expectations which result in more blood and oxygen being sent to a part of the brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex, the part of the brain that registers pleasure. Brain scanning using a method called functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) showed evidence for the researchers’ hypothesis that changes in the price of a product can influence neural computations associated with experienced pleasantness. This happens even though the part of our brain that interprets taste is not affected. The sensation of pleasantness that we experience when tasting wine can be linked to its price.
The research, along with other studies the authors allude to, are putting a serious dent in economists’ notions that experienced pleasantness of a product is based on its intrinsic qualities. Several studies they quote have provided behavioral evidence that marketing actions can successfully affect experienced pleasantness by manipulating nonintrinsic attributes of goods. For example, knowledge of a beer’s ingredients and brand can affect reported taste quality, and the reported enjoyment of a film is influenced by expectations about its quality. Even more intriguingly, changing the price at which an energy drink is purchased can influence the ability to solve puzzles.
So, you really do get what you pay for (according to these studies, at least).
Before you and I go and hike up the price of any services or products that we offer in an attempt to automatically influence perception of quality, I need to give a word of caution. The participants in this study did not pay for the wine themselves. The pleasure may also have have come from thinking they were drinking an expensive wine they had not paid for themselves. Who knows what the effect of paying for the wine might have had on their taste experience? I suspect if they could well afford it, similar results would be obtained. However, if they had little money and the wine was expensive, they may get less pleasure in drinking it.
If you had to pay to read this blog, would it make the experience any more valuable?
________________
Source: “Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness.”
Hilke Plassmann, John O’Doherty, Baba Shiv, and Antonio Rangel.
PNAS published early online January 14, 2008.
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0706929105
An interesting blog and from what I can tell you are a red wine drinker.But then I am a bit of an expert aren’t I when to comes to “carrot juice.” and people’s behaviours.
What does concern me about supermarket’s selling tactics is that they will have a lot of offers and schemes. Buy this for so many loyalty points, buy one get second at a lower cost. Also, the percentage of alcohol in these bottles when you look at them is pretty high, and makes the units drunk almost secondary.
Some of the wines I like best (I only drink white never red), are the cheapest. My husband has done his best to lure me into the expensive range but I always come back to my Chardonay at £3.99p.
As far as the experiment goes, it has more rigour and evidence-base when the brain measurements are recorded. You would not beable to consciously manipulate these. This removes possible subjective data collection on the pleasurable effects of saying drinking one certain bottle of wine. This would include the temp of the wine drunk , the environment, the person’s individual tastes, the age of the wine etc and the way in which it was stored, possibly could potentially influence results. You have mentioned others already.(see, I am learning about quantitative analysis).
Going back to my first comment. I do feel there is a manipulation in the market place for us to drink more. Alcohol is a very sociable and acceptable recreational substance but it is well documented that we are seeing ever an ever increasing levels of illness, crime, domestic disharmony and addiction because it is too readily available and often very cheap.
In the end it is society and relationships that pay.