One can hear not infrequently that producers and sellers spent too much funds, time, and efforts on advertising, product publicity, its design and packaging or association with celebrities. That comes not only from laymen which, being potential buyers, see in such expenditures an extra spur to increase in prices but also from economists and marketers who seem to be directly involved in motivating the consumers. The logic this line keeps to is, on the surface, natural and convincing. Good product must be self-selling (true coral needs no painter’s brush). Another story is the bad merchandise. As it does not arouse enthusiasm the seller has to foist it on buyers.

That is why there is no surprise in the advice present in a form in many textbooks on marketing. If you are ready to spend so much funds on persuading the consumer that your produce is worth his attention is it not better to invest them in it so that to get a truly decent thing capable of carving its way to buyer’s heart? Otherwise, improve the quality of commodity instead of blowing up its merits. For, if it really possesses them the consumer will easily get at that on his own and appreciate its advantages over the rivals (analogs or substitutes).

However this outwardly “ferroconcrete” logic is actually lame in both legs. Not because quality does not matter. To the contrary, it is a primary factor determining the fate of the good. Ultimately, if a detergent cannot launder the linen, however it may be praised they will be bound to deny that. And if the consumer alone cannot make it out he will be aided by experts which, with devices in hands, will show him that the product does not meet its own claims. That is, beyond doubt, so under clear circumstances or in a remote prospect. But what should be done in the act of choosing between the goods not heavily differing in their quality?

The snag is that in most cases, people are not in a position to assess quality with a sufficient accuracy. They think in terms of “liked – not liked” rather than “meets – falls short of”, and even purposely setting the task to select a good on some quite definite criteria, face considerable, at times overwhelming, troubles. And when the difference in quality between the rival products does not leap to the eye it would be the height of naivety to reckon on consumer perception. The vast majority, irrespective of life experience and the measure of acquaintance with the subject, cannot cope with elementary identification and comparison tasks.

Seven decades ago, the American psychologists Locke and Grimm devised a curious experiment (Locke B., Grimm Ch. H. Odor Selection, Preferences and Identification // Journal of Applied Psychology. 1949. Vol. 33. N 2. P. 167 – 174). They tried to find out what women guide by while buying perfumes and how they implement their preferences. For that, a wide group of 69 female students in an advanced collegiate course in psychology had been selected. Their average age was 24.7 years (from 19 to 50), while experience in using perfume rather large (from 1 to 25 years, with the average 7.2 years). Nevertheless, they turned out to fail not only in determining, more or less neatly, the quality of perfumes but also in setting a boundary between different levels of quality.

The subjects had correctly distinguished the expensive perfumes from the cheap ones only in 55 percent of cases. It means that the result obtained by them was just over the threshold of chance. At that, expensive perfumes were more often passed for cheap than cheap ones for expensive, what apparently evidenced of that they deliberately restrained themselves in judging (being afraid of going too far). To boot, the appraisal had been virtually nowise influenced by either the length of experience in dealing with perfume or the frequency of using it.

Another remarkable result consisted in the essential discrepancy between the value of perfume and its pleasantness. Nay, in the capacity of more pleasant perfumes, appeared more often cheap ones, while dear perfumes got passed, rather, for unpleasant. Thus, a crisp dissonance between the perceived quality of product and its estimated value came into view.

Finally, a bullet point had been put by the women’ identification of common well-known to them perfumes. Notwithstanding that only eight items had been employed in the experiment the participants recognized them in less than a quarter (23.5 percent) of cases. Even when a part of them (35 people) had been informed about which perfumes exactly they had to identify, their accuracy went up only to 44 percent.

But, may be, it is the peculiarity of women, while men are capable of making “rational” choice in the areas they are well acquainted with?

I’m afraid it is not so. Even if men do in this regard better than women, no more than by a hair’s breadth. The common laws of human perception affect them in the same way as women.

To make sure of it one is offered to set an experiment like that conducted by Locke and Grimm, but as applied to men. The items to be identified might be, for instance, the kinds of brandy. Beyond doubt, at recognizing the ageing and the country (region) of origin of specimens or at estimating their value (price category), men will err not much more rarely than women dealing with perfumes.

Hence, a number of practically important conclusions are to be drawn:

1. The resolving power of human perception allows, in most cases, no crisp discrimination of products which differ in quality from each other by less than a formidability. That is why the actual notion of their additional (“premium”) quality gets formed in consumers not in accordance with factual features and merits, but depending on what “moral” support (by way of design, packaging, advertising, publicity, social popularity, etc.) is rendered to them. In this sense, whatever technical contrivances “Opel” may employ most people will not perceive its cars as of more quality than those of “Mercedes”. One can interrupt this tendency only with long-term comprehensible work in the markets which implies painstaking efforts and big investments, or due to “catastrophes” capable of destroying the established attitude towards the rival products (e. g., several consecutive failed attempts to offer a novelty or frequent mass recall of production because of faultiness or malfunction of the key units and assemblies);
2. The actual prices of products within the same price category are determined not by the differences in their quality which few notice at all, but almost solely by concomitant circumstances, including not only the deliberate (intentional) efforts of seller but also the random oscillations of markets or social wafts unexpectedly shifting the interest from some products to other. To jack up the price within these limits one needs not so much to improve its consumer properties as to draw the people’s attention to them, to limelight their attractiveness and present in a beautiful “envelope”, to suggest the buyer it is just this product that mostly answer his hopes and expectations. Sure, so efforts add nothing to the real (“technical”) quality, but, instead, they make it “visible”, sometimes creating a phantom of quality where no trace of quality itself exists;
3. Even the best products cannot be sold without proper support unless it is singular. Where a good has decent rivals, albeit yielding to it in quality but not to the extent to be dismissed out of hand, that will unavoidably lose should the necessary entourage emphasizing its merits not be secured. For, actually is sold in the market not the quality as a material substance, but, rather, its image which gets begotten in the consumer’s mind not only and sometimes not so much by immediate consumption as by an emerging round it halo essentially modifying or even transfiguring the perception of its useful properties by buyers.