Here’s a quick quiz for you.
Imagine you go to a cafe and you see two options on the menu:
Option A is a cup of coffee. Option B is the same cup of coffee plus a muffin. Except the muffin comes with a clear disclaimer:
“This muffin is either fresh or left over from yesterday”
Now here’s the quiz question:
Let’s say that both option A and option B cost somewhere between $2 and $6. How much do you think option A — coffee only — costs…
And how would you rate the cost of option B — coffee and a possibly fresh, possibly stale muffin?
Think about it for a second.
And while you think, I want to make it clear this isn’t just a fanciful, hypothetical question.
In fact, it represents a very common situation in online marketing, where people regularly have a standard offer, like an ebook (that’s the coffee in the example above)…
And then they tack on a free bonus, like a second, less valuable ebook (that’s the muffin).
The thinking goes, if people want what you’re selling, they will only want it more in case you give them anything as a free bonus as well. Right?
To answer that, let’s go back to the quiz above. What value did you put on the two options?
Perhaps you said the coffee alone was $4…
And the coffee plus muffin was $4.25.
Even if those aren’t the exact numbers, odds are, you didn’t think option B could be worth less than option A. It just wouldn’t be logical.
And you’re right. Only one problem, though. People are not logical.
We know this because psychologists have run an experiment very similar to the scenario above.
To start, they presented both options A and B as above.
In this case, people reliably evaluated option B — coffee + questionable muffin — as being slightly more valuable than the coffee alone.
But here’s the twist.
If people were shown only one of the options and asked to evaluate how valuable it is…
Then they would value coffee alone at, say, $4…
But if they were shown the coffee + questionable muffin, they would value it at something like $3.25.
Did you catch that?
The coffee + muffin, evaluated in isolation, is perceived as less valuable than the coffee alone.
The issue, of course, is that the muffin could be trash left over from yesterday. And nobody wants to pay for trash.
This isn’t really logical — because the trash shouldn’t take away from the solid core offer.
But like I said, people aren’t logical. They don’t add up the value (so say the psychologists) of the perfectly good coffee with the possibly crappy muffin.
Instead, they seem to average out the value of the good coffee and the suspect muffin — making the total offer worth less than the coffee alone.
I think the message is clear if you’re considering tacking on bonuses to your core offer.
Either make your muffins fresh, or don’t add them in and spoil the coffee.
And if you want more freshly roasted marketing ideas that are not trash, you might like the following: