Supersize me!
3 minute read
The marketing team at a big fast-food chain started noticing something curious related to a special lottery offer they were running for their customers. They noticed that even though all customers, regardless of their order size, were entered into a lucky draw for a grand prize, they tended to increase the size of their order significantly during periods when the chain ran a lucky draw offer. When the manager of the chain brought this to the attention of his friend (Who happened to be a University professor), it immediately piqued his curiosity. Do customers have an inherent belief that despite no indication by the company running the lucky draw, purchasing a larger value increases their likelihood to win the lucky draw?
To test this, the university professor along with some colleagues tried to run an experiment in their university. They collected a group of college students and asked them to take part in a study. They divided these students into 2 groups (One was the Lucky draw group and the other was the control group).
The students in both the groups were asked to imagine that they were visiting a fast food restaurant and were required to buy a cup of cola from the different sizes available (Small, Medium, Large and Extra Large).
The students in the lucky draw group were also informed that they had a 1 in 6 chance of winning a prize if they bought a cola (regardless of the size) from the fast-food chain. It was clearly mentioned that their odds of winning the prize was not linked to the size of the cola cup.
When the researchers aggregated the results of the study and compared the 2 groups, they found that the students in the Lucky draw group were much more likely (8% ordered the Extra Large cup in the lucky draw group compared to 1.8% who ordered the Extra Large cup in the control group) to order the larger size cups compared to students who were not informed about the lucky draw.
Based on the results of this small experiment, the professor went back to the manager of the fast-food chain and told him that the lucky draw strategy was not only brilliant in terms of getting more customers in through the door to buy more cola but it also nudges them to order larger sizes and increase order value. A complete win for the fast food chain and any other company wanting to replicate a similar offer.
Original research by Nükhet Taylor, Theodore J. Noseworthy and Ethan Pancer