Humans have long considered ourselves superior to other members of the animal kingdom (or at least most of them). While they have automatic and easily exploitable responses to some external stimuli, we’re far too clever to fall for those sort of tricks. Or are we? Leif Stromnes, managing director of strategy and growth at DDB Australia, investigates.
Anyone who has ever been to watch Greyhound racing will have noticed the mechanical hare that the dogs pursue around the track.
The choice of hare is no coincidence. Greyhound racing has its roots in an ancient sport called “coursing”, where Greyhounds would hunt and chase live prey, such as rabbits or hares. The name greyhound is thought to have originated from the old English grei, meaning dog and hundr, meaning hunter, and for nearly 8,000 years greyhounds have been admired for their instinct to chase and catch small furry animals.
This instinct for greyhounds (and most dogs) to chase small prey is what ethologist Konrad Lorenz calls a “Fixed Action Pattern” or a FAP. FAPs are sequences of innate behaviour that are often performed in a seemingly fixed and stereotypical manner by all members of a species.
Wild turkey mothering for instance is activated by the ‘cheeping’ noises their chicks make, regardless of other features such as their smell, touch or appearance. The extreme reliance of mother turkeys upon this one sound was dramatically illustrated by animal behaviourist M.W Fox in an experiment involving a mother turkey and a stuffed polecat. For a mother turkey, a polecat is a natural enemy and the experimenters found that even a stuffed model of a polecat, when drawn by a string towards the mother would result in a vicious attack. When, however, the exact same stuffed replica carried inside it a small recorder that played the “cheep cheep” sound of baby turkeys, the mother not only accepted the oncoming polecat but gathered it underneath her. When the machine was turned off, the mother attacked the polecat once again.
FAPs are thought to be the reserve of lower intelligence species that require automatic and involuntary actions to help them navigate their environment and access the resources necessary for their survival.
What about humans then? We like to think that we are free from FAPs because of our ability to learn complex behaviours with the help of our large brains but before we smugly enjoy the ease with which we are able to get greyhounds to pursue a mechanical hare, or a mother turkey to mollycoddle a polecat, let us consider two things.
First, the FAPs of these animals work very well the great majority of the time. It takes a trickster like a scientist to make the mother turkey’s innate response seem silly. Secondly, automatic, stereotyped behaviour is actually prevalent in much of human behaviour because, once again, it works very well most of the time.
And now comes the interesting bit. Like the greyhound chasing the mechanical hare, or the mother turkey taking the polecat under her wing, humans are equally susceptible to being tricked, but we have to accept the imperfections of our FAPs because there really is no other choice. Without them we would stand frozen by complexity as the moment for action sped by and away.
The renowned British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead recognised this inescapable quality of modern life when he asserted that “civilisation advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them”.
Pricing is the most advanced of the actions “we can perform without thinking about them” because so many of our daily decisions include a trade-off between the quality of the item we require and the price we are willing to pay for it. We need shortcuts to make these decisions possible.
Good marketers understand the potency of pricing and the importance of getting the right “feel” so that, like the greyhound chasing the hare, the purchaser’s instinct is triggered in an automatic and positive way. There are many FAPs when it comes to pricing, but there are three that stand head and shoulders above the rest.
The first is the “rule” that you get what you pay for. In the real world this translates into expensive = good quality, and we see this FAP work extremely well for luxury items and items that consumers cannot easily price reference.
This often leads to the economically irrational situation where marketers sell more of an item when they put the price up. This phenomenon is so prevalent it even has a name; “Veblen pricing”, named after the world-renowned economist Thorstein Veblen who first noticed its effects in 1899.
In the example above, round pricing numbers help to signal quality – $2,000 for that new iPhone for instance, but “charm” pricing, which is at the other end of the spectrum, works in exactly the opposite way. For lower priced items or any items of known value, dropping the price from $10 to $9.99, for instance, has an incredibly powerful effect on consumers. Our busy brains immediately lock in on the strange numbers ($0.99) and register the lower price. Rationally this is nonsensical because 1c does not make a material difference, but our FAP kicks in and in an instant we feel that the price is right.
Finally we have anchoring. A price anchor is the reference point that we use to judge whether the price we are quoted feels fair. Our overloaded brains tend to lock onto the first price information we receive and this primes and sets the stage for all subsequent information. Rather than making consumers search for the anchor, savvy marketers quote the anchor price using simple tactics like “Was $500. Now $350” and because the anchor price is always higher, the new price feels reasonable in comparison.
One might think that our susceptibility to these pricing tactics is something to be ashamed of, but our willingness to make decisions on a single piece of available data like a price is a necessity in modern life.
With the sophisticated mental apparatus we have used to build world eminence as a species, we have created an environment so complex, fast paced and information laden that we must increasingly deal with it in the fashion of the animals we long ago transcended.
