Price Transparency

I spent far too much time moaning about the price of pints.

I'd harp on about the £3 ales I used to buy and how they're £5.50 today.

And then I saw this image.

Taken from The Times based on figures from Ukospitality and the British Beer and Pub association

13p profit!?

Suddenly £5 for a pint seems quite reasonable.

And there's evidence to prove this price transparency tactic works.

In 2020, Harvard researchers¹ tested the effects of showing a product's costs.

Rather than just listing the price, they showed ingredient cost (and profit margin).

For the test, this ad was shown in the Harvard canteen.

Real-world sales were measured directly after the student saw the ad.

Turns out, students were 21% more likely to buy the soup 𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐬 𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐰𝐧.

Showcasing your costs boosts trust and makes customers more likely to buy.

Big thanks to today's sponsors, GWI.

Are you stuck in a creative rut ahead of your next campaign? Or working late again to prepare for a pitch?

Don’t stress — just ask Agent Spark, your on-hand insights analyst.

Agent Spark gives you insights on your audience in seconds — so you can get inspired, validate hunches, and build smarter campaigns backed by consumer data.

The insights are backed by 2M+ annual surveys and billions of consumers — the same GWI data trusted by teams at Google, Microsoft, and Spotify.

And the best part? You can use it in the GWI platform, ChatGPT, Claude, or your favourite AI tool. You choose.

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Hope you enjoyed today's newsletter — Phill

¹Mohan, B., Buell, R. W., & John, L. K. (2020). Lifting the veil: The benefits of cost transparency. Marketing Science, 39(6), 1105–1121.

As a behavioural science practitioner, I believe in the peak-end rule.

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