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According to Marketing Experiments' Dr. Flint McLaughlin, whenever you use an X-Y range in your ad, most people will revert to the first number as the mean (average) standard. In other words, on a range of 35-50%, one will assume that 50% off is the exception, and most items are 35% off. (Slide 18 of PPC Live Optimization Clinic replay)

A few days ago, I wrote about the power of the word "New" to get our attention - if there's a more potent attractor out there, it's almost certainly "FREE!" For years, advertising gurus have listed "free" on every compilation of powerful headline words. Now, research conducted by Dan Ariely (a Duke behavioral economist, previously at MIT) shows us that "free" is far more effective than "almost free." Indeed, a preference for "free" seems to be another feature hardwired into our brains.

In both Decoy Marketing and More Decoys: Compromise Marketing, I wrote about how adding an item to a lineup of products could increase sales. In the former, the "decoy" was a product that was less attractive than another product but priced the same, or almost the same. This caused sales of the more attractive product to jump, perhaps because it looked all that much better by comparison to the similarly priced but less attractive product. Now, researchers at the University of Minnesota have used brain scans to show that it's easier for people to make a decision when a third product option is present vs. choosing between just two possibilities.