Price & Pleasure
According to “Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness,” by Antonio Rangel, Hilke Plassmann, & Baba Shiv, if people are told a wine is expensive while they are drinking it, they think it tastes nicer than a cheap one.
The researchers used fmri (functional magnetic-resonance imaging) to scan the brains of 20 volunteers while giving them sips of wine.
Dr Rangel gave his volunteers sips of what he said were 5 different wines made from cabernet sauvignon grapes, priced at between $5 and $90 a bottle. He told each of them the price of the wine in question as he did so. But he lied. He actually used only 3 wines, and served two of them twice at different prices.
The scanner showed that the activity of the medial orbitofrontal cortices (an area of the brain responsible for registering pleasant experiences) of the volunteers increased in line with the stated price of the wine. When one of the wines was said to cost $10 a bottle it was rated less than half as good as when people were told it cost $90 a bottle, its true retail price. When the team carried out a follow-up blind tasting without price information they got different results. The volunteers reported differences between the three “real” wines but not between the same wines when served twice.
Nor was the effect confined to everyday drinkers. When Dr Rangel repeated the experiment on members of the Stanford University wine club he got similar results.
This research suggests that a successful marketing campaign can not only make people more interested in a product, but also make them enjoy it more.
“Hitting the spot,” The Economist