What Heinz Discovered

Some prefer video, while others like to read. The written version can be found below the video:

Retailers (online and offline) really care about Price Elasticity. It determines their bottom line.

Price Elasticity Definition

The measure of the responsiveness of consumers to a change in a product’s cost. Definition source.

It follows that if the price of a product is increased, the overall number of units sold drops, and vice versa. But this is not always the case.

The Heinz story

Heinz discovered that increasing ketchup bottle sizes from 24oz to 36oz boosted sales without reducing how often people purchased them.

When Heinz analyzed consumption patterns, they found both the 24oz and 36oz bottles were used up at about the same time. This meant that people used ketchup more liberally from the 36oz bottle, so it didn’t last longer than the smaller one, as one might expect.

Switching from 24oz to 36oz helped Heinz increase ketchup sales by 13%.

More Buyer Psychology Stories

If you liked this price elasticity story, you will like the next nine, too: My Favorite Buyer Psychology Stories.

A Little About Us

We are a group of marketers who don’t care about best practices. Our interest is in discovering things other marketers don’t know so we can give ourselves and our clients an unfair advantage.

Over the last 15 years, we’ve run 1000s of A/B tests and learned a lot of fascinating things about buyer psychology. But the most important thing we’ve learned is this: you need to ignore 84% of your site visitors and triple down on Healthy Skeptics.