Perceived Value

A wise man once said that human nature doesn’t change. In fact, this was said by several wise men, all of whom probably belonged to the epistemological school of thought. Marketing isn’t exempt from this. It seems that every new developing technology only draws attention to how easily we humans are swindled by framing and design.

Consider Antoine-Augustin Parmentier, a food promoter born in 1737 back before even Hotmail was at its peak. Parmentier was an army pharmacist captured in Prussia during the Seven Years’ War, and while in prison was forced to eat potatoes that the French saw as ‘hog feed’.

Ever the optimist, Parmentier realised that potatoes were actually an excellent food source–cheap, nutritious, and easy to grow–and wanted to introduce them to France as part of a nutritious diet. The problem was, the idea didn’t take. Returning home to France, Parmentier couldn’t garner any interest in his newfound passion for potatoes. Even when he tried to give the crops away, no one seemed to want them.

So what did he do? He framed them differently.  

Parmentier placed his own private patch under heavy guard, instructing the guards to accept any and every bribe offered for the potatoes. The people assumed that a crop under such heavy guard must naturally be pretty valuable, and the townsfolk came in droves to haggle and barter. Soon enough, Parmentier’s entire patch was close to wiped out.

This was in the 1780s. Before social, before big data, before content marketing, and long before pop-psych digital gurus pushing their methods of circumventing the fallacies of the human mind and to make people ‘love’ brands.

What Parmentier understood was that making something attractive enough to be wanted, even when no one wanted it initially, depended on how it was framed in the design of the environment. People “stole” his potatoes because the presence of guards increased their perceived value. Parmentier didn’t need an eighty-slide presentation and three months of customer analytics to tell him that.

The digital environment is no different, and in many cases, biases that we are folly to in the real world are only exacerbated online. Getting people interested in a product depends far more on framing and environmental design than on co-creation, story sharing, and ‘influencers’.

In the end, it’s all about being remembered enough to elicit feelings of ‘want’.

a.ce