I’m almost certainly in the top category - a so-called high skeptic - on Obermiller and Spangenburg’s grading of consumers’ resistance to advertising claims. I’m endlessly irritated, for instance, at prices that end in 95p or 99p rather than go the whole hog. This tactic is crude and familiar, but other forms of number manipulation and the quasi-technical terms describing them increasingly crop up in commercial conversation.
Theorists of customer behaviour and information load describe my bugbear as the (positive) nine-ending effect, closely related to the (negative) left digit effect - if increasing the price causes the leftmost digit to change, the sale may well be lost. In analysing consumer inference and the processing of brand information the experts cite a numerical superiority effect. This simply means that claims expressed in numbers (“78.6 per cent effective”) appear to be objective - based on empirical data - while claims expressed in words (“finished to the highest technical standards”) tend to be judged as subjective. The same distinction operates between round figures or round numbers, often suspected of being guesstimates, and sharp numbers, assumed to show verifiability. This quirk of human psychology is described by experts as precision heuristics. Round numbers, incidentally, don’t always have to end in zero: given our system based on tens, fives are also salient (ie more memorable and processed more readily).
Mathematician Stanislas Dehaene highlighted these and other psychological features of number-perception a decade ago (and P&G’s claim that its Ivory soap was “99 and 44/100 per cent pure” is a century old), but only recently have they begun to cross over into public awareness. The housing market in particular has woken up to a related phenomenon - buyers have an innate tendency to treat sharp numbers as lower than round ones. They may, for example, unconsciously perceive £725,000 as higher than £725,647. Sharp numbers play a key role, too, in the pique technique, also known as mindful persuasion, whereby a request is made in an unusual way to pique the subject’s interest, usually illustrated by the simple example of a beggar asking for 97p instead of a pound. Such requests have been shown to have a potential 60 per cent success rate as opposed to 10 per cent for round figures.
In US financial journalism, by the way, the phrase sharp numbers has another, predictable, sense: it means the numbers that hurt.
Send your favourite buzzwords, jargon or new and exotic usages to tony.thorne@kcl.ac.uk
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