In this presentation, Steve Jobs used the anchoring principle

[hasibaakterss3309]

The use of the anchoring principle is one of the aspects that I check during the audit of landings and sites for launching advertising and promotion. What it is and how it works, I will tell in the article.

Many people know the spectacular presentation of the iPad in 2010, where Apple founder Steve Jobs, a brilliant speaker, used the anchoring principle when announcing the price of the new iPad. He asked the audience: "What price should we set for it?" (the new iPad). And after a short pause, he noted that marketers calculated - $ 1,000 (at that moment the price appeared on the screen - 999). After the speaker, Steve Jobs talked about the advantages of the product (against the background of the same figure - 999 dollars), and at the end of the presentation he said: "We are pleased to announce that the price of the iPad is not 999, but only 499 dollars."

In this situation, viewers no longer had any mongolia company email list doubt that the price - $499 - was not just a justified price for the device. It was a very good price.



What is the anchoring principle?
In 1598, in the article “Assimilation and the Influence of Anchoring Stimuli on Judgments,” researchers described the property of our brain to make decisions by attaching to a certain “anchor.” The title of the publication conveys the essence of the phenomenon. We need a starting point, an initial stimulus, a starting value for comparing all subsequent objects with it.

Later, in the 1970s, renowned scientists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman theorized the anchoring heuristic. In their experiments, they concluded that the number initially presented to a person affects the perception of all other values. It was this feature of our consciousness that Steve Jobs used in his iPad presentation.

The anchoring principle is the tendency of our brain to rely on numbers we already know when evaluating some unknown information. It is amazing that the principle works even in cases where the numbers belong to completely different categories of information. For example, as in the famous experiment by A. Tversky and D. Kahneman, when two groups of subjects were asked to recall the number of African countries in the UN, having initially watched the spin and stop of a roulette wheel (in which a stop was laid at one of two fixed values). In this case, the first group was shown the number 65 before the question, and the second - 10. Not having an exact idea of ​​the number of African countries in the UN, representatives of the first group named a number around 45, and the second group - 10. Thus, the number initially shown to the participants of the experiment influenced the subsequent assessments of the respondents.

The number that buyers see first influences the perception of all products. As a result, prices for products on the site are subconsciously compared with the first numbers the user sees.