You Get What You Pay For
Or, rather, you get what you think you paid for.
Interesting study in marketing: a cheap (10 cent) pill doesn't kill pain as well as an expensive ($2.50) pill, even when they both are the same placebos.
Crazy, huh?
Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University, published his findings in a letter in the March 5th edition of Journal of the American Medical Association (full text is $15 or read the Science Daily article here or listen to it on NPR's Morning Edition here).Ariely said, "Physicians want to think it's the medicine and not their enthusiasm about a particular drug that makes a drug more therapeutically effective, but now we really have to worry about the nuances of interaction between patients and physicians."
And cost. Don't forget perceptions based on cost.
Consider that researchers from the California Institute of Technology and Stanford's business school "have directly seen that the sensation of pleasantness that people experience when tasting wine is linked directly to its price. And that's true even when, unbeknownst to the test subjects, it's exactly the same Cabernet Sauvignon with a dramatically different price tag."
Researchers found that with higher priced (which were identical to lower priced wines) more blood and oxygen was sent to a part of the brain "whose activity reflects pleasure".
The researchers added: "Contrary to the basic assumptions of economics, several studies 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.
And, back to the $2.50 pill, "Even more intriguingly, changing the price at which an energy drink is purchased can influence the ability to solve puzzles." ( By way of CNET News.)
Which is why you shouldn't blame me if this post stinks. As I opted for coffee at home to help me write rather than the $4.50 latte up the street at Starbucks.
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