The 10 Biggest Offer Blunders

Why don’t other people love your business as much as you do?

Why don’t you get the kind of response you’d like to your emails, ads or mailings?

Why do you get only mild interest or blank looks from people when they ask you what you do?


I want to make two bold claims. Here’s the first:


As it stands right now, your offer is - almost certainly - resistible. It’s easy to say ‘no’ to. When you tell people in your target market what you do, when you place ads or try to market your services - you’re met with either confusion, blank faces, mild (read: polite) interest, ‘That’s nice,” followed by a change of topic or . . . absolutely no response at all.


Here’s the second:


Radically (not moderately) improving the irresistibility of your offers is the simplest and most powerful action you can take to grow your business - pretty much at any pace you want. Literally like a faucet you can turn on or off at will.


That sounds like hype.

And of course there’s more to it.

Having an offer won’t do everything.

You still need to know where to find your target market.

And you still need to have a plan on how exactly you plan to introduce your offer to them.

It’s important to make sure you have the business systems in place to make sure you can consistently deliver on what you promise.

You still need to think about the mechanisms, incentives and excuses to make it easy (and desirable) for people to talk about what you do.

All true - but consider this:

What good is it to know where to find your target market if you have nothing to offer them. Or - more to the point - nothing they are excited to buy?

How can you possibly create a strategy around introducing your offer - when the offer isn’t that good?

What’s the point of creating some really whizbang word of mouth strategy if all it’s going to do is let people know that what you’re offering is actually pretty mediocre?

But let’s go back to the first . . .


People just aren’t that excited about what you have to offer. Let me tell you exactly why your offer hasn’t been pulling even a fraction of the response you secretly know it could.


You don’t want confused faces when you tell people what you do.

You don’t want polite interest.

No, you want them to say, “Hell yeah!” or “Wow! How do I get one?”

Your offer must - at the very least - get their attention and engage them to want to know more. It must at least strike the chord of relevance.

Your offer must be crystal clear. It must give easily understandable answers to the following questions:

1. What are you offering me? (in plain english)

2. What’s the return on investment (ROI)? If I give you my hard earned money - what do I get back? Why is this worth it to me?

I’d be willing to be that you aren’t answering these questions as well as you might think you are.

In fact, let me tell you the logical reasons why people aren’t as excited about your offer as you wish they were. There’s 10 likely culprits to the disinterest you’re getting from the marketplace. I think they’ll make a lot of sense to you.

Big picture: It’s because there are certain core elements of your offer that aren’t ‘right’. You can look for all the bells and whistles and fancy new marketing tactics but - at the end of the day - if you’re missing these things your offer is much more likely to fail.

In fact, if you are suffering from too many of the following the problem may not be that you have a ‘bad’ offer - but that you have NO offer.


The 10 Biggest Offer Blunders


1. Unclear or Non-Existent Target Market: I’d say that I see this in about 90% of the cases of resistible, moribund offers. When I ask “who is this for?” I get answer that translates as “everyone. this product/service can help everyone.” But targeting everyone doesn’t work. You can’t do it. When you narrow your focus to just the communities you most love and are best able to helps you will be shocked at how the floodgates of creativity open up. You will find yourself in a place to create offers that pull many times the response of our current ‘do-nothing’ offers.

2. No clear problem being solved. This is directly related to #1. Your inability to articulate - with crystal clarity and profound empathy - the experience, problems and needs of the person your marketing too stops everything dead in its tracks. The first filter that your product and service has to make it through is the filter of relevance. People look at everything product or service and silently ask themselves, “can this help someone like me?” And if they don’t get an immediate answer of yes - the game is over - no matter how great your product is. Hard but true. They must see themselves in the product. It must be immediately apparent - with no need for guess work - that this can help them with a problem they are currently experiencing.

3. No clear results being promised. This is the flip side or mirror image of #2. You can’t just give empathy for the problem they experience - you need to paint a picture of what life would be like without the problem. You need to tell them exactly what sorts of results, benefits or changes this product will bring. You need to articulate the experience they’ll have once they own it. Most businesses don’t do this - instead, they drone on ad nauseum about how great they are.

4. Wrong Package: If you’re really clear about the three above (and I can tell you that you probably aren’t even if you think you are) and there’s no response still - then it could be a few things - almost certainly you haven’t identified the right mix of products and services. If you have a core product and service - that product or service can be made far more relevant by choosing a target market and far more valuable by adding other products and services to it. It can be made more valuable by thinking through the whole experience people will have with you from booking the appointment to the appointment itself to them leaving. From them buying the product to using it. With a few simple tweaks and additions your offer can likely be twice as attractive. What to add? What to tweak? This depends 100% on who your target market is and what problems they’re dealing with.

5. Wrong articulation: To correct that - people just aren’t that excited about what they understand of what you’re offering. You’re using a lot of confusing jargon. You’re speaking in platitudes.

6. Too much too soon: You’re trying to sell them on the whole farm on their first visit. You aren’t taking the time to build a relationship. It’s as if they come into your ice cream shop and ask to try a taste of the pistachio gelato and you try to sell them a quadruple scoop waffle cone. You haven’t thought through you marketing strategy from meeting to buying.

7. Selling your methodology before promising a result: When people ask what you do - what do you tell them? What is it that you highlight in your ads or on your website? For most people it’s their company name and logo. This is the first thing that people see. Hard truth moment: no one cares. But the next place a lot of people go to is straight to how they do what they do. The classic example is someone at a cocktail party saying, “Oh, I do a unique combination of trager, shiatsu, the reconnection, quantum healing and rebirthing.” Eyes glaze over. Awkward silence ensues. No business occurs. What just happened? They jumped to far ahead. People don’t actually care how you do what you do until they know what you do and who you do it for. I don’t tell people, “I do workshops and one on one consulting.” That’s how I do my work - but it’s not what I do. What do I do? I work with green, community minded and holistic entrepreneurs who are struggling with their cashflow and not attracting enough clients and what I help them do is to craft strategies that allow them to attract more of the kinds of clients they’re looking for.

8. No empathy for or understanding of ‘industry frustrations’: In every industry there are certain things that piss people off. Cell phones? The way they lock you into unbreakable contracts. Plumbers? The show up late, don’t fix it right the first time and charge you more than the initial quote. Web designers? You always have to go to them to make updates on our site, which they charge you for, and you have to wait til they get around to it. Make sense? The point is that it’s not just one company that does these things. It’s the whole industry. And here’s the golden question - do you know what these are for your industry?

9. Not understanding why people are really buying what you’re selling and not speaking directly to those needs and desires: This one is shockingly difficult to wrap one’s mind around. We spend years becoming experts in articulating the features and benefits of our products and services - but we’re still novices at articulating the experiences, problems and needs of our target market. Remember, they aren’t buying your product per se. In their minds, they’re buying relief from pain. They’re buying a solution to a problem. But what is that problem or pain? Can you articulate it better than they can?

10. No case being made: credibility. It’s not enough to make wonderful, huge claims about what you can do. You must be seen as a credible source of the solution they need. They must trust that you can produce the results you say you can. You must, in short, make your case before the jury of your target market. You must show them the steps you would take them through, give them evidence (e.g. testimonials, case studies, certifications, articles written etc). Without credibility - they will not buy. Period.


Before you add any bells and whistles you must have your core information figured out. You must know what it is that you’re offering to whom - and why exactly they would find it irresistible.

Six Sins of Greenwashing

Do you know that your competitors aren't as green as they SAY they are?

Are they misleading the public?

Sure they are.

A lot of big companies are.

Arm yourself with this information on the 6 major types of greenwashing. To get it - just click on the link below.


http://www.terrachoice.com/files/6_sins.pdf

Traditional Sales is A Cult

Hey there,

One of the most brilliant people I've ever met is Ari Galper.

He's the only person I've ever known to so powerfully articulate the notion of removing pressure from sales (and to point out that pressure is THE problem in sales).

Read these words from his blog (and then go read the whole article) . . .

Dear friend,

During my teen years, my father who is a Psychologist, dedicated a few years of his career as a specialist helping parents get their adult children back from being brainwashed into cults.

He was one of a handful of experts who was skilled at “deprograming” these cult members and helping them transition back into a normal family environment.

I remember in vivid detail the amount of emotional energy my dad put into helping the parents of these kids (I call them kids, because their parents always talked about them as their children) cope with the dysfunction caused by the powerful “pull” that these cults had on their members.

My dad would spend hours, sometimes around the clock, helping these people break loose from the mantras and destructive thinking that was preached by their cult leaders.

As you can only imagine, it was a gut wrenching experience for these parents to see their kids lose themselves into a group that teaches breaking away from the people who care about them most.

Well, one thing my dad used to tell me, was that these cult leaders would indoctrinate their members with the same mantras and messages that have appealed to members in the past year after year.

Same messages, same thinking, same results, year after year, without awareness of the harm that it does to others.

The uncanny thing about all this, is that I see myself in very much the same role as him -- helping people who sell, that have been “indoctrinated” into old school sales thinking, break away from the same messages and old thinking that disconnects them – not from those who care about them – but from themselves.

You see, many of the old and newer sales “gurus” continue to pitch these same tired dictums: “Go for the close”, “Rejection is a normal part of selling you have to accept” , and “If you’re pitch isn’t working, it’s YOUR fault and you aren’t cut out for sales.”

And that type of thinking is what creates a wedge between how you’re “supposed” to communicate with a prospect and how you normally communicate with another human being.

It’s a new business environment out there, and if you’re not building trust, being completely authentic and helping solve others’ problems, then you’ll continue to be disconnected from true success.

Take a look at this article I originally wrote about four years ago, “7 Ways to Cut Loose From Old Sales Thinking”, it’s just as relevant today, as it was then:

to read the article click HERE.

You Irresistible Offer Should Solve a Problem

Some people make the huge mistake of just trying to come up with clever things that make them different.

Again - the question is, “Why should I buy from you vs. the competition?”

People will buy from those who are best equipped to solve their problem or get them out of pain. So your USP should center around that and speak to it directly.

Your business cannot and should not attempt to create a need that consumers do not already have. No matter how great your USP or marketing schemata, if your product ultimately does not satisfy your customer, then your product and consequent business will fail.

You need to do plenty of valid and reliable research on your target market in order to understand which emotional responses will drive them to your product instead of your competitors.

Simplicity. A great product. Combine these two entities together to form the perfect USP for your company and product/service line.

To quote Rosser Reeves from his book Reality In Advertising:

"Each advertisement must make a proposition to the consumer. Not just words, not just product puffery, not just show-window advertising. Each product must say to each reader: ‘Buy this product and you will get this specific benefit.'"

* * *
Again, from Matt Hockin’s website:
www.interactivemarketinginc.com

The following are 6 powerful USPs that alleviate the "pain" experienced by the consumers in their industries..

Example #1 - Package Shipping Industry

Pain - I have to get this package delivered quick!
USP - "When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight." (Federal Express)

Example #2 - Food Industry

Pain - The kids are starving, but Mom and Dad are too tired to cook!
USP - "Pizza delivered in 30 minutes or it's free." (Dominos Pizza)
(This USP is worth $1 BILLION to Dominos Pizza)

Example #3 - Real Estate Industry

Pain - People want to sell their house fast without loosing money on the deal.
USP - "Our 20 Step Marketing System Will Sell Your House In Less Than 45 Days At Full Market Value"

Example #4 - Dental Industry

Pain - Many people don't like to go to the dentist because of the pain and long wait.
USP - "We guarantee that you will have a comfortable experience and never have to wait more than 15 minutes" or you will receive a free exam."

Example #5 - Cold Medicine Industry

Pain - You are sick, feel terrible, and can't sleep.
USP - "The nighttime, coughing, achy, sniffling, stuffy head, fever, so you can rest medicine." (Nyquil)

Example #6 - Jewelry Industry

Pain - The market hates paying huge 300% mark-ups for jewelry.
USP - "Don't pay 300% markups to a traditional jeweler for inferior diamonds! We guarantee that your loose diamond will appraise for at least 200% of the purchase price, or we'll buy it back."

The Secret to Being as Radical as We Want to Be

A powerful article by Michael Shuman:

The Secret to Being as Radical as We Want to Be is to Finance the Revolution Ourselves

Adbusters
March-April 2006
Michael Shuman, author, The Smallmart Revolution


If Mohandas Gandhi were a typical North American activist these days, he would probably be wearing a three-piece suit and working in a plush office with his law degree prominently displayed. He would have little time to lead protests, since every other week would be spent meeting with donors – and those power lunches would hardly go well with fasting. He would be careful to avoid salt marches or cotton boycotts, so as not to offend key donors. To sharpen his annual pitch to foundations, he would be constantly dreaming up new one-year projects on narrowly focused topics, perhaps a one-time conference on English human-rights abuses, or a documentary on anti-colonial activities in New Delhi. To ensure that various allies didn’t steal away core funders, he would keep his distance and be inclined to trash talk behind their backs. In short, there’s little doubt that the British would still be running India.

The problem with activism today is that it is largely funded by grants and gifts from rich foundations and individuals. The long-standing assumption that you can take the money with few strings attached, and then run, needs to be fundamentally reexamined.

Building a philanthropic base of support can cripple an organization’s mission and wreck it altogether when the well runs dry. Most nonprofits have engaged in a kind of fundraising arms race in which our best leaders focus more time, energy and resources, not on changing the world, but on improving their panhandling prowess to capture just a little more of a philanthropic pie that actually expands very little from year to year. Armies of “development” staff spend as much as a third of an organization’s resources, not to advance the poor, but to cultivate wealthy donors. Significant numbers of our colleagues create campaigns, direct-mail pitches, telemarketing scripts, newsletters and other products exclusively to “care and feed” prospects and to frame positions that will not offend the rich.

Nonprofit structures dictated by this mode of funding also burden organizers with the heavy regulatory hand of the state. To qualify for tax-deductible contributions, for example, US nonprofits must agree to limit lobbying and not to campaign for political causes of candidates.

We believe it’s time for North American progressives to break free from the philanthropic plantation. Those of us serious about social change increasingly must get down to business, figuratively and literally. Every social change group may not be able to generate all its funding through revenue-generation, but every nonprofit certainly can generate a greater percentage than it is doing now. In other words, we should become our own funders. Once we start generating our own resources, we can invest them politically – as corporations do now – largely without limitation, without wasting our time on fundraising appeals, without worrying about that next grant, without apologies.

To get a sense of the possibilities, check out Cabbages & Condoms, a popular restaurant in Bangkok. As your senses become intoxicated by the aromas of garlic, ginger, basil, galangal and lemongrass, you cannot avoid noticing the origins of the name. On top of each heavy wooden table is a slab of glass, under which are neatly arranged rows of colorful prophylactics. Posters and paintings adorn the half-dozen large rooms, all communicating the restaurant’s central message: the AIDS epidemic afflicting Thailand can be checked only through the unabashed promotion and use of male contraception. With balloon animals made from carefully inflated and twisted condoms and the after-dinner candies replaced with your own take-home “condom-mints,” even teens cannot escape the message prominently framed on the wall: “Sex is fun but don’t be stupid – use protection.”

What makes the five “C&C” restaurants unique, along with an affiliated beach-front resort and numerous gift shops, is that they are all owned by the Population and Community Development Association (PDA), a rural development organization that has been a leader in promoting family planning and fighting aids in Thailand. Seven out of every ten dollars spent by the PDA on such activities as free vasectomies and mobile health clinics are covered by the net revenues from its 16 subsidiary for-profits. Were the PDA dependent on funding from the Thai government, the World Bank or even the Rockefeller Foundation, it no doubt would be told to tone down the message. Jokes on its website – like “the Cabbages and Condoms Restaurants in Thailand don’t only present excellent Thai food, the food is guaranteed not to get you pregnant” – would certainly be discouraged.

The cash flow gives the PDA a measure of confidence and boldness. The founder, Mechai Viravaidya, has no qualms about his decision to employ for-profits:“Unlimited demand is chasing limited supply [of charitable donations]. No longer are gifts, grants or begging enough. From day one, thirty years ago, we have been acutely aware of sustainability and cost-recovery.”

Consider some US examples of social entrepreneurship:

Housing Works in New York uses its Used Book Café to generate more than $2 million annually for its work, which prioritizes advocacy for homeless people with HIV. The organization runs clinics, conducts public policy research, lobbies federal and state officials, even leads sit-ins. It is fearless, aggressive and stunningly effective – and its $30 million of annual work would be impossible were it not for its vast range of real estate, food service, retail and rental companies that help pay the bills.

Pioneer Human Services is a community development corporation based in Seattle that assists a wide range of at-risk populations, including the unemployed, the homeless, ex-convicts, alcoholics and addicts. The organization serves 6,500 people a year and generates nearly all its $55 million budget through a web of ambitious subsidiary nonprofit businesses: cafes and a central kitchen facility for institutional customers, aerospace and sheet-metal industries, a construction company, food warehouses, a real-estate management group and consulting services for other nonprofits. Most of the jobs in these businesses are awarded to its at-risk clients,
allowing it to further its mission to integrate clients back into society.

The Rocky Mountain Institute, a leading promoter of alternative energy technology in Snowmass, Colorado, created E-Source in 1986 to provide in-depth analysis of services, markets, and technologies relating to energy efficiency and renewable energy production. In 1992 RMI secured a program-related investment from the MacArthur Foundation to move the work into a for-profit subsidiary. By 1998 it was generating about $400,000 for the parent nonprofit, but rmi decided it could do even better under new management, so it sold the company to Pearson plc in Britain for $8 million. Today, RMI assists and benefits from other for-profit spinoffs, such as Hypercar, Inc., which aims to create a lightweight body architecture to improve the efficiency of the entire US automobile fleet.

Judy Wicks’ White Dog Café in Philadelphia is as much a community organizing center as a restaurant. Radical speakers from around the country provide a steady stream of public lectures. An adjacent store sells fair trade products and will soon be introducing a line of locally made clothing. The White Dog itself embodies principles of social justice and environmental stewardship by paying all employees a living wage, insisting on humanely raised meats and eggs, using locally grown ingredients and running on wind electricity. Twenty percent of profits from the restaurant go to the White Dog Café Foundation, carrying on the café’s mission through nonprofit
activities.

These examples embody many possible models. A for-profit subsidiary can generate money for a parent nonprofit. Or, better still, a for-profit can become the change it seeks, by producing and selling socially important goods and services. While we reject the libertarian argument that every human problem has an economic solution, many social-change issues clearly have economic dimensions that are susceptible to creative business plans. Hate nuclear power? Launch energy-service companies to spread conservation measures, or build local wind farms to take control of your own electricity future. Concerned about the poor, minorities and women having equal access to credit? Create more community banks, credit unions and micro-enterprise funds. Troubled by pharmaceutical prices that make life-saving drugs unattainable for impoverished people across the globe? Start, as several companies based in the developing world did, companies that mass-produce affordable generic versions of high-priced American drugs.

Socially responsible business should be not just a boutique sector of the private economy, but its mainstream. We have been impressed in recent years by the growing number of local businesspeople who not only “walk the walk” of social justice in the small details of their operations and products but also tout the virtues of local ownership. This third generation of entrepreneur-organizers is being led by groups like the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) and by the American Independent Business Alliance (AMIBA). Each promotes local ownership of business, champions social justice and neighborhood revitalization, and pushes for new public policies that remove the tilts in a playing field that favors badly behaved
big business.

Sooner or later, the concepts of social-change organization and of social-responsibility business should become indistinguishable. Truly responsible businesses would be owned by all members of a community (rich and poor), hire locally, expand local skills, comport with local labor and environmental standards, produce goods and services that meet urgent local needs and become allies of social justice movements. What better way to help the poor than to transform them into the captains, worker-bees, shareholders and customers of community-friendly business?

If foundations and donors had never existed and professional panhandling had been outlawed, social-change groups would have been forced to turn to creating and running new enterprises or new networks of local businesses, and our movement would be considerably healthier than it is today. Progressives have become the classic 20-something kid still living at home, expecting an allowance from deep-pocket parents for a few basic chores, while agreeing, as a condition for the chump change, to obey someone else’s rules on social change. It’s time to grow up and strike out on our own.

Here’s a challenge to activists (one we take seriously ourselves): let’s try to wean ourselves from the charity habit, say by three percent per year. Think about just one piece of your agenda that could be framed as a revenue generator, dream about it a little, develop a business plan and give it a try. If you lack the skills, skip your next fundraising class and instead attend one of thousands upon thousands of entrepreneurship programs around the world. Or hire someone who might start the entrepreneurial subsidiary of your nonprofit.

Gandhi understood that the key to freeing India was to transform his fellow citizens into economically productive agents by spinning their own cloth and taking their own salt from the sea. Martin Luther King Jr. implored African Americans to form their own credit unions and community development corporations. The secret to being as radical as we want to be – and as radical as we need to be – is to finance the revolution ourselves.

* * *

Michael Shuman is the vice president for enterprise development for the Training and Development Corporation. Merrian Fuller is a managing director of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies. This article was adapted from “Profits for Justice,” which first appeared in The Nation.

Seven Secrets To An Irresistible Offer

Seven Secrets To An Irresistible Offer - Dan Kennedy

www.dankennedy.com

#1: The offer must be clear. People must be able to understand it instantly. Confused people do not respond. For example, half off is better than 50% off and a lot better than 35% or even 60% off. People have difficulty understanding percentages. Two for one is usually better than half off.

“Is your product positioned as part of a general class, then differentiated on the basis of it's most needed attribute? That's the way people hold things in their heads: "the dandruff shampoo that doesn't dry out your hair". The cereal that adults have grown to love." "The luxury four wheel drive". If you can't state your product in such succinct terms, chances are your customers will not be able to describe your product either. And if your product can't survive word of mouth, it probably can't survive at all.” - The Secrets of Word-of-Mouth Marketing, George Silverman

“Always remember - The confused mind says ‘no’. If there’s too much information, consumers get overwhelmed and they don’t know what to do. What happens is they stop, dead in their tracks. We find if you offer people more than 3 options, they won’t make a decision. They’ll just sit and look over and ponder the information.” - Colette Chandler, www.marketing-insider.com

#2: The offer must be a good value. It has to be understood as a good value. That's why percentage off coupons doesn't usually work well. People get suspicious. They think as soon as they see I have coupons they'll just raise the price to recover the discount. Percentage off coupons work well where there are known published prices.

#3: The offer should involve either a discount or a premium or preferably both. Sometimes premiums work much better than discounts. A premium is something you give away as a free gift to someone who comes in or who makes a purchase. Bill Glazer in his retail store meticulously track results of all his offers and has found that by adding a premium he will average a 30% increase in response.

#4: There should be a logical reason for the offer. If you discount or give something away without an explanation you create skepticism and suspicion. People have been told all their lives there's no such thing as a free lunch. You have to explain. We're doing this to introduce ourselves to the neighborhood as an introductory offer in celebration of opening our new store, as an anniversary sale, a clearance sale, customer appreciation week. Just about any explanation will do but there needs to be an explanation.

#5: There should be a reason for immediate action - expiration dates, limited availability or a bonus for fast response. These all work well in creating a sense of urgency on the consumer's part.

#6: There should be a strong, clear, direct call to action. Tell the person exactly what you want him to do. Do you want him to pick up the phone and call? Go to a website? Come in to a business? When? What will happen when he does?

Here's a good call to action, for example. Cut this coupon out of your newspaper. Bring it in to any of our locations any day of this week from 8:00 am to 8:00 pm. Take it to the cashier at the counter; she'll give you your free travel alarm clock a gift for just coming in while the supply lasts. Then feel free to browse through our unique travel store. Take advantage of the huge mark downs and sale prices and get a second travel clock free with any $50.00 purchase to give to a friend.

#7: Consider mentioning or even emphasizing your guarantee. Guarantees are not tired, not worn out - they still work. They're still important to people. If you offer any kind of guarantee I think it ought to be an integral part of all your advertising.

Raising Prices Makes People Like You More

Afraid to raise your prices?

You might not need to be . . .

Want the public to like your product better? Raise the price.
Published: Monday, January 14, 2008 | 11:43 AM ET
Canadian Press: THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON - Want people to like your product more? Raise the price.

That seems to be the lesson from a new study in which people were asked to taste wines marked with different prices. Researchers scanned the brains of the testers and found that the part of the brain that records pleasure lit up more for the more pricey vintages.

And that was true even when - unknown to the testers - they were sipping a wine that they had liked less when it had a lower price tag.

Antonio Rangel and colleagues at California Institute of Technology thought perceptions of higher price meaning higher quality could influence people, so they decided to test the idea.

They asked 20 people to sample wine while undergoing functional MRI's of their brain activity. The subjects were told they were tasting five different Cabernet Sauvignons sold at different prices.

However, there were actually only three wines sampled, two being offered twice, marked with different prices.

A $90 wine was provided marked with its real price and again marked $10, while another was presented at its real price of $5 and also marked $45.

The testers' brains showed more pleasure at the higher price than the lower one, even for the same wine, Rangel reports in this week's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In other words, changes in the price of the wine changed the actual pleasure experienced by the drinkers, the researchers reported.

"Our results suggest that the brain might compute experienced pleasantness in a much more sophisticated manner that involves integrating the actual sensory properties of the substance being consumed with the expectations about how good it should be," they reported.

© The Canadian Press, 2008