How Do Marketers Take Advantage Of The Just Noticable Difference (JND)?

I guess that could stand for a couple of things, depending on which Wikipedia entry you’re looking at. But basically the JND is that key point to where you’re looking at something and you can start noticing that there’s a difference between how it is now and how it was before. I know this is kind of wishy-washy but I’m going to get into it.

As an example, over the past couple of years I’ve noticed that the cleaning solutions, dish detergents or clothes-washing fluids, they used to have these big, efficient, really cool bulky looking containers that you got used to.

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Big cubicle prisms, big rectangle-looking containers that had X-number of ounces on there. You were used to it. You were used to paying a certain amount of money for the certain sized container.

But all of a sudden they all started getting a little more curvy, a little more “save the plastic, save the Earth” friendly and it wasn’t until you started looking at the actual volume of liquid in there that I noticed a difference. Before, it was 128 oz of this dish detergent, but now it’s 108.75 oz for the same price and basically the same package but just a little bit different looking feel.

However, it wasn’t so much that I stopped buying it because I felt cheated, the marketing geniuses at Proctor and Gamble or whatever, and the product packaging testers have put all this stuff together and tried different varying package sizes and volumes to where they could optimize the amount of money they get for the amount of product that they have to sell.

Ultimately, it gives the customer less value but it’s such a point to where, well, they don’t really notice. It’s just below that noticeable difference level. We, as humans, are very good and pay a lot of attention when we notice change from a previous state to the current state.

So what do you do to get the most out of the people you’re selling to if you’re a company looking to maximize profits and maybe not so much concerned with what’s good for the customer? You skirt right below that Just Notable Difference.

Maybe it sounds a little funky and it can be done the right way to where you’re helping out, but taking advantage of the JND, like online, is along those similar lines of finding what supposedly the market will tolerate, not just in price, but in the way an offer is presented to basically get more compensation for the product or the service that you provide.

It’s not always obvious or seemingly unethical as the example that I’ve provided and it’s a very legitimate part of marketing that needs to be understood. But make sure you stay on the good side of it.

I’m sure you can think of more examples but that’s the one that most recently came to mind because I noticed it. So that marketing team, I guess, violated the JND for me. Maybe they did for you too.

That’s all I’ve got for that today. Good luck out there. Peace out, have a good one.