Expensive Product = Good Product
A study has been done that shows just how important your project stakeholder’s expectations can be when they evaluate a product.
The study was done by researchers from the California Institute of Technology and Stanford’s business school, as reported last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, who discovered that the pleasant sensation experienced by people when tasting wine is directly linked to its perceived price, and not to the actual quality of the wine.
They found this by scanning the brains of 20 volunteers who were tasting wine. The volunteers were told that the five wines they were tasting ranged in price from $5 to $90, whereas there were actually only three wines, and two of them were served at different prices.
The researchers found that when the volunteers were told that the higher priced wines were being served to them, more blood and oxygen was sent to a part of the brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex, whose activity reflects pleasure. The effect was the same regardless of the actual wine served, and was confirmed by follow-up testing that included members of the Stanford University Wine Club.
This does seem to explain how some expensive modern art can attain legendary status among collectors, whilst appearing to be a pile of junk to the uninitiated. The collector, having paid a fortune for the pickled sheep or blank canvas, really does believe it is beautiful.
So we need to be aware of the very powerful effect of marketing and expectations on people’s perceptions, in order to ensure project success.
Link to a CNET News article on the subject and the Stanford news.