Your brain responds better to marketing than you think it does.

We’ve all heard something to the effect of “If you’re average looking, hang out with ugly people so you look more attractive.” Of course, it’s all about comparisons.

Turns out the same thing is true of online product marketing. There’s a fascinating article about decoy marketing in an equally fascinating blog (to which you should totally subscribe). (It’s from last month, I know, but our friend at The Cart Blog recently drew our attention to it.)

Here’s an interesting except that hopefully makes you want to read the entire article:

So, jumping back to the shaving gel topic, if a drug store received a shipment of promotional cans with an extra 20% of product inside, their first reaction might be to remove the regular cans from the shelf until the promotional stock was gone. What customer would be dumb enough to buy the small can when the bigger cans were the same price? According to decoy marketing logic, however, the store would be well advised to leave a few of the small cans on the shelf with the bigger ones. As counterintuitive as it seems, the presence of some small cans so would likely boost sales of the larger promotional cans – perhaps even taking market share away from competing products that came in the larger size to begin with.

This is potentially a very profitable concept to grasp. Perhaps FoxyCart should offer our normal $15/mo plan, and a $15/mo plan without support for email receipts. It’d be interesting to see the effect.