[Arny Krueger]

"Harry Lavo" wrote in message


Clearly, Arny, I didn't say there was an objective MRI
study back in the sixties.

You said that: "Those of us who studied marketing or applied psychology have
known about it since the '60's"

So now the question is what did you mean by "it". The antecedent of the
pronoun was a published study. The study had the use of a MRI as a key
component.

I said it was pretty well
established among a certain knowledgeable fraternity that
higher prices often equated to perceived quality and
vice-versa.

Unhh, I see. We have a free-floating "it". ;-) When it gets shot down in
one part of the sky, it magically reappears someplace else. Isn't that
called waffling?

I happened to get my MBA at Northwestern in
'63, a time when one of the lead faculty was Dr. Sidney
Levy of Behavioral Research Associates, a well know
behavioral psychologist. We had anecdotal access to this
sort of knowledge as well as to the scientific work then
extant, translated into the business world.

In 1963 I was a hi fi salesman, and I had plenty of anecdotal and direct
access to real life consumer sales. I didn't have to translate into the
business world, I was there.

It was pretty well established among the working sales fraternity in 1963
and probably 1903, that higher prices often equated to perceived quality and
vice-versa. In fact, part of my job was informing my clients about the
details of that equation. I tried very hard to keep it real.

In the audio world, higher quality is very often equated with a very
one-dimensional view of product quality: sound quality.

Why should a customer care whether or not a CD player chassis is plastic,
thin steel stamped and bent, machined bars of metal screwed together, or
milled from a single billet of aluminum? The universal, one-size-fits-all
answer is the single-billet chassis sounds better. Ker-ching - the customer
gets a $3000 CD player which oh by the way uses the CD transport from a
$69.95 boombox whose chassis is a mixture of plastic and stamped steel.

In the cited study, there's no evidence that the test subjects were told
that the wine tasted better, because that would be a bald faced lie. The
claim that it was more expensive was a questionable claim, but it might have
cost $90 a bottle if ordered by the glass in a very expensive restaurant.