Know-How Exchange : Customer Behavior

50% I believe but as usual it depends on your audience. Just test it.

Dear Zac

It’s not often I disagree with Kathy, but I had the same idea for a bit of empirical research, so I used your actual words, in inverted commas. I think that the difference in our findings is possibly entirely down to the phrase we used. As I can’t see Googling the popularity of a phrase becoming the replacement for using market research for measuring the effectiveness of a marketing message, I guess that the results are a bit academic!

For what it’s worth:

“Half Price”
Google web Search 1,460,000
Google pages from the UK 1,060,000

“50% off”
Google web Search 677,000
Google pages from the UK 107,000

So “Half Price” appears to win by a wide margin, not that I’d base my next £1M marketing strategy on it!

The same search also threw up past discussions (I’ve got Google Desktop to scan my entire network including the non-128 bit encrypted parts of the company network) and out of 48 documents, the marketing people tend to use 50% off – that’s as in, “Tests have proved that Professional Marketers will use New, Improved Zippo “50% Off” rather than your old “Half price” product promotion”

To be spoken in an assertive voice by a bloke with a military haircut.

It’s not that net-searches can prove anything you want them to – it is a matter of how you phrase your question and how you view popularity as a means of taking marketing decisions. Remember the old 1970’s iconic cartoon / poster? “Eat Shit; 30 trillion flies can’t be wrong”

Personally I’d go for the 50% off because it sounds better and farfromnormal’s allusion to the half price being a negative is probably nearer to what I feel, regardless of the opinions of fellow flies!

Yours sincerely

Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions

A- Lux is correct. Just test it.

The internet reserach thing tells you nothing really.

Yes, Harry, but how do you test it in retail for POS materials with any level of statistical accuracy which is to be believed for less than the cost of a multi-store survey or A/B trial?

Even if it is only for one store, you will need to conduct the survey or trial over an extended period of time in order to judge the different opinions of the differing profiles of customers you get at different times and on different days of the week.

所以除非有可用的预算,“只是测试ting” might be prohibitively expensive.

I’m not so sure that simply asking a handful of customers would be, statistically speaking, much better than taking some expert opinions (Such as from here) or taking a flyer on what other people appear to like. It’s also worth reminding ourselves that polling the web will tell you what people do in web adverts.

It might be instructive to hear from a retail expert (there’s one called “retail” on this forum) what they think and also what the differences are in the effectiveness of a message used in POS material, versus the same message used on web advertising.

That’s a long way of saying “I agree with you” but I feel that we owe Zac a bit of analytical detail – otherwise it’s just a case of “Take my word for it”

Best wishes


Steve Alker
Unimax Solutions

50% off is better - less to read and people get it mentally quicker than half off - the math is easier....

Now if you want to move more product have a "Buy one, Get one Free!" Now you've used the magic word and sold twice as much!

Good Luck. See my profile to email

PS - Always good to test if you are able to measure the results and have infrastructure to do so. It will validate your efforts.

It really is perception -

50% off denotes a discount

Half Price denotes unloading merchandise- why would any sell items at half price- because they do not sell at full price.

But I love Kathy's look at the Google Stats- that was brillant ----SHE WINS for best snapshot and great ingenuity!

Good Luck & Happy Marketing ~ Bill