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The violin world often stages blind tests comparing Stradivarius and modern instruments. As often as not the audience prefers the sound of the modern instrument.
Does this mean a Stradivarius isn’t worth the vastly greater price?
Of course not. Anyone interested in buying the best violin available knows about these tests and yet the price commanded by Stradivarius' instruments continues to rise.
People love the feeling that they have the very best and the association of Stradivarius with a stratospherically high price just adds to the allure.
It helps too that the product is scarce. Only 1100 were built and around 650 remain (and he won’t be knocking any more out now!).
Does this mean blind tests like those used in consumer (marketing) research are a waste of time and money? Yes .
Products are perceived in the context of the associations our unconscious minds map onto them.
- The price
makes an item more precious to
us.
- The brand name is a whole bag of associations: some created by the brand’s marketing, some from our own encounters and experiences with that brand.
Naturally, it’s important to make your product good. But that is only part of what’s needed if you want to be perceived as precious.
[This is a lesson Coke famously learned when they introduced a new recipe in the 1980s to fight Pepsi. Everyone got sidetracked by the Pepsi taste test – a blind taste test that said people preferred Pepsi. ]
When consumers encounter a product they don’t analyse it scientifically. Asking them to do so triggers a different way of looking at the world and different mental processes.
Guess what?
When that
happens they arrive at a totally different
conclusion.
The best way to
find out what people think of your product is
to watch them when they’re shopping around
it.
With practice you can see what they think by looking at how they interact with it and the other products around it.
Violinists will say they interact differently with a Stradivarius (even if a listening audience can’t tell the difference). In the player’s mind this isn’t an illusion - it's a by-product of all the powerful associations they have with that name.
But you could waste a lot of money trying to mimic the instrument’s properties. What you make won’t be a Stradivarius and so it will never feel like one to someone who knows and values the (brand) name.
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Sources:
Penn State University (2008, November 22). Is A Stradivarius Violin Better Than Other Violins?. ScienceDaily. Retrieved November 23, 2008, from http://www.sciencedaily.com¬ /releases/2008/11/081108164152.htm
Swedish Research Council (2005, July 13). Scientists Dispel The Mystery Surrounding Stradivarius Violins. ScienceDaily. Retrieved November 23, 2008, from http://www.sciencedaily.com¬ /releases/2005/07/050712233805.htm
Get a Deeper Understanding of Your Consumers
A lot of the work I do for manufacturers and retailers involves watching their consumers’ behaviour and working out what’s really going on in their minds at an unconscious level.
You
can get a deeper level of consumer insight
for your product or store by employing a
consumer behaviour expert to see what’s
really going on.
Please contact me if you have a project you
wish to discuss or if you have any questions on
consumer behaviour:
philip@philipgraves.net
© 2008 Philip Graves Consumer Behaviour Resource. All rights reserved.