This got me thinking today just in terms of promoting a business as this little advertisement I got was for a dentist I believe where they are trying to attract new patients and in order to do so you can see in this brochure it says free teeth whitening $499 value so that’s a pretty good deal if you intended to actually get something like that. There is a stipulation of course where it says you have to actually complete a new patient exam and dental cleaning so you don’t exactly just get it for free. You’re going to have to spend money and who knows how much that actually costs from this place in general.
But what was interesting is how even though they advertise you can get free teeth whitening which is a $499 value they say you can also get a $50 gift card. So I’m thinking, how many people would actually take the $50 gift card versus the $499 teeth whitening? You almost feel dumb if you take the $50 gift card. It’s almost similar to when you walk to the supermarket and see say the 200g of crackers or something like that for $1 and then you see another 100g of crackers for $5. Why in the world would you take the $5 one? Now granted not everyone may want teeth whitening so maybe it makes more sense to get the $50 gift card. But it made me wonder if this is by design to make people take the teeth whitening because you feel pretty silly for not taking something with that much value.
It almost reminds me of like when you go to say a restaurant as some people actually intentionally put all these choices from cheap to expensive so you kind of buy something that’s let’s just say in between or the best value afterwards. It made me wonder if it’s kind of the same psychological strategy. Here you put the two offers and for anyone who thinks of even taking the lower value, you just feel silly. You end up saying “I’m going to find a way to take advantage of the first one if anything”. If I was doing this, I’d probably try to use the first option for someone else if I actually didn’t need to. Assuming it’s transferable, but highly doubt it anyways since it says you need to complete a patient exam and all that.