394. Anchoring and Adjustment in Business (Refreshed Episode)

Welcome to episode 394 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy Today's episode is all about anchoring and adjustment. Ready? Let's get started. You are listening to the Brainy Business Podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now here's your host, Melina Palmer. Hello. Hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. Today's episode is dedicated to one of my favorite concepts, anchoring and adjustment. I have been waiting for the perfect moment to refresh this one. As I said, anchoring is one of my very favorite concepts and I talk about it all the time. This was originally episode 11 of the podcast, so it's been waiting a long time for this moment. Back in the sun so what amazing circumstance justified the refresh of this one today? It's because my wonderful friend Kwame Christian is back on the show this coming Friday and it seems that we always end up talking about anchoring in our conversations. In fact, the episode when he was on talking about how to use anchoring in negotiations is my top recommended next episode to listen to, which is linked for you in the show notes. So it felt like the perfect fit for Bit for this week to tee up that chat, which is sort of an Inception style episode. I was asking him questions from my students as a reverse interview for his show, Negotiate Anything and the conversation was so good that I knew it had to be an episode over here for you all as well. So if you aren't yet subscribed to the show, now is a great time to do that to ensure you don't miss that episode when it comes out this Friday or any other episodes of the show. Speaking of those notes, don't forget that there are links for everything, including past episodes, books and articles all waiting for you in the show. Notes for the episode, which are found within the app you're listening to and at the brainy business.com394 all right, let's talk about anchoring. If you are an avid listener of the podcast or have heard me speak before, you know one of my all time favorite studies features this concept of anchoring and adjustment. I have touched on it in a few episodes including the top five Wording Mistakes Businesses make, the Truth About Pricing, how to Sell from the Stage and in last week's on air strategy session with Marielle Court. Here, I will tell you a little more about the study that I like to reference as I get into the concept of anchoring and adjustment. Like loss aversion, this is one of the main concepts in my signature talk. Consumers are weird, but if you've already heard me give that presentation, don't worry. There are a lot of extra things I'm bringing into this episode. Things you haven't heard before. As a reminder about how our brains work. When your subconscious brain does not know the answer to something, it takes a guess. Some might call this an educated guess, but often it's more working off rules of thumb, which is where all these concepts in behavioral economics come from. As your brain is processing your subconscious at 11 million bits per second, it's using these judgment calls a lot to guide you through your day and life. When I introduce the concept of anchoring and adjustment, I always go with a little question and answer game to get things started. While I can't hear your responses, I'm going to go ahead and just ask you questions and know it should work the same. I'm trusting you not to Google the answer. Just go with your gut to get a feel for how this works. Okay, are you ready for the question? Are there more or less than 10,000 emperor penguins in Antarctica? And how many do you think there are? Do you have the number in your head? There are actually 595,000 thousand emperor penguins in Antarctica. Was your number a lot less than that? Or say I was to ask you, are there more or less than 1,000 countries in the world? How many do you think there are? There are 195 countries in the world. Was your number higher than that? What happened? Your subconscious took the number I threw out to you and assumed I must know something about emperor penguins or the number of countries in the world, which is why I gave you that first number. What if I had simply asked you, how many emperor penguins are there in Antarctica? Without the preface of is it more or less than 10,000? Would your number have been different? Or what if the anchor I gave was 1 million or 10 million or a hundred million? Here's the thing. Your brain is really lazy. It has a lot going on, but it's all about shortcuts. It relies on them for basically everything when it can. And when I ask a question about countries, for example, your brain's conversation with itself might have been something like, hmm, let's see how many countries I can name. No, that's gonna take too long and it's a lot of work. If I hadn't given an anchor, it might have used some other rule of thumb, like estimating. And you would have said, well, I know North America has three, and then there's Australia, New Zealand out there. Let me think of a map. Maybe there's an average of 20 countries on each other continent. Or how about I pad that a little because I'm probably forgetting a bunch of. So let's say 30. 30 per continent means 120 plus the handful I named. So I'll guess 125. You know, not too far off. And it's still based on estimation. It's. It's easier than trying to list as many as you can. But because I gave you the high anchor of a thousand, your brain skipped that whole estimating thing and went with the easiest possible path. I also, you knew you had a short answer of period of time to answer, so it was quick to throw something out. And your brain thought, you know, she must know something about countries, which is why she gave me that number to start with. Seems pretty high, but I don't know a lot of countries. I'll just go with 600 or wherever you ended up. The really fascinating thing about this is it works with completely random numbers, ones that should have no impact on the question. About a year ago, I was giving a presentation to a group of female entrepreneurs, something I do a lot, really love speaking to those groups. For this particular group, I did something a little different than I do in most of my presentations. I asked everyone to think of the last two digits of their Social Security number. Then I asked them to look at my necklace. I don't often wear really large pieces of jewelry, but this one was particularly blingy, so everyone in the room could see it clearly. I asked them to think about how much they thought that necklace was worth. And do you know what happened? People who had a higher last two digits of their Social Security number valued the necklace higher than those with a lower last two digits. As I explained to the audience, I said, you know, studies have shown someone with higher last two digits like 89 will value the item higher than someone with a lower last two digits, like 1, 2. One woman raised her hand and said, the last two digits of my Social Security number actually are 89. Side note, what are the odds of that? But she said, last two digits of my Social Security number actually are 89. And when you asked about the value, I thought $89. And then I thought, no, that's stupid. I'll say 65. And that is exactly how anchoring and adjustment works. For the record, the woman with the lowest last two digits in the room. Hers were 00. Valued the necklace at $35, a full $30 less. This is based off a study Dan Ariely talks about in his book Predictably Irrational, which I reference often in the podcast. As he says there, don't worry if the last two digits of your social are high. It doesn't mean you've been overpaying for things your whole life. This only worked because it was entered into your mind just before I asked the other question. That's called priming, which will have its own foundational episode soon. The effects would wear off quickly as our brains, as you know, are quickly churning through information. So my favorite study that I always reference when I talk about anchoring and adjustment was one involving Snickers. There are two grocery store end cap displays. They're almost identical with only one word different from one to the next. The first said Snickers bars, buy them for your freezer. And the second said snickers bars, buy 18 for your freezer. I think we can all agree that 18 is a sort of ridiculous number of Snickers bars to buy at once. Not a common occurrence. Maybe if you're buying for the soccer team or Halloween, but not every day. So as a marketer or someone creating a message, you would use logic to talk yourself out of putting this number on an ad. You might say, them is unlimited. Someone could get 100 if they wanted. Or yeah, people are going to ask how I came up with the number 18. I don't want to have to justify an arbitrary number. Couldn't make that much of a difference anyway. But what actually happened? The truth is, it does make a difference. A huge one. The sales of Snickers bars increased by 38% when the number 18 was used instead of the word them. 38% for changing one word. Why? When you're walking through the store and you see an ad with the word them, it likely doesn't even register as a blip in your brain. If it does, you might think, sure, I'll get two or three and drop them in the cart. But the number 18? That might stop your subconscious brain because it's such a silly number. You might think, 18? That's crazy. I'm way better than all those people who are buying 18 Snickers bars. I'll just get six. Did you see what happened? That's anchoring an adjustment at work. We can be scared to throw out big numbers in our businesses, but it can make a huge difference in sales. That study with the Snickers bars, which is linked in the show notes, of course also goes into detail for other grocery stores examples that are using those high anchors. For example, when an advertisement for yogurt or cans of soup, let's say is listed at 10 for $10 you will buy more than if they're listed at $1 each. And what about limits? Another study within that same article looked at discounts on cans of Soup. There were three conditions, all with the same 10 cent discount, so nothing huge. In one variation it was unlimited. People could get the 10 cent discount on any number of cans purchased. Again, you could buy a hundred if you wanted. The next group had a limit of four cans of soup that qualified for the 10 cent discount and the last group had a limit of 12. What happened again? You might think those people who need to stock up on soup will stock up regardless, but that would be too logical. When the number was unlimited, the average was 3.3 cans of soup with a limit of four 3.5 cans. So it went up a little. What about with the limit of 12? They doubled an average of 7 cans purchased. Crazy but true. Last week I was featured in an article on Hiya called 7 tips for better back to school shopping and that Hiya spelled H I G H why A And there's a link in the Show Notes if you want to check it out. The first tip in the article was watch out for the quantity discounts and discussed how anchoring and adjustment can come into play on shopping Trips. Applying that 10 for ten dollar on things like pens. The article has some other really great tips from retail specialist Ivy Chow. So there is, like I said, a link in the Show Notes if you want to check it out and read it again. It's just another way that you can apply anchoring and adjustment. One other example I mentioned to the author that didn't end up in the article was about back to school clothes. Let's say you decided to do your shopping at Target or Walmart for me or whatever because they have a little bit of everything school supplies and clothes at affordable prices. On your way in you see a kid's T shirt at the door for $99. You might think, whoa, Target's prices have gone way up. Not sure if I can afford to buy here this year. And when you get to the clothes section, you're pleased to see the shirts are on sale and around $40 apiece. So you stock up and get three because that was just a little more than the price of one shirt regularly. But was it? Maybe they were $25 last year and that anchor reset your brain to think for $40 was a deal instead of a huge bump up. They don't want you to buy the $99 shirt. I mean, they'd be happy if you did, I'm sure. But that isn't its purpose. It set that high anchor for you on shirt prices so when you see the other prices they seem low and you buy more and feel better about it. Note this has nothing to do with Target or Walmart or Fred Meyer. Whatever. I have no idea how much their kids shir, but I use them as an example of a retailer with good value to help you get the image in your mind so that those prices made sense. Okay, now you might be thinking, what about all the other businesses out there? How can you apply anchoring and adjustment into your messaging? I thought you'd never ask. Now that you know what anchoring and adjustment is, I'll spend the remainder of the episode sharing a lot of other examples and and ways you could use this in your business or work life. I came up with a ton of examples for this one, including some for those working inside an organization for nonprofits, for car sales, real estate, and more. First, let's start with the jewelry store. In last week's episode. I talked quite a bit about this with Marielle in her on air strategy session, so I'm not going to recap it all here. If you haven't listened to that yet or want a refresher, check out episode 10 after you finish this one. However, one thing Marielle was doing was when people called and asked her about pricing, she used too low of an anchor. Obviously, when her customers get more expensive jewelry, she makes a larger amount on the sale, so it's in her best interest to get people looking at and buying more expensive pieces. When people would call on the phone, she would say that gold pieces started at $70 and go up from there. During our actual strategy session, she had let me know that she has pieces as high as $800. I'm not sure if that made it in the final cut of the episode, so I wanted to give you that context. The funny thing about anchoring an adjustment is when Marielle tells someone that gold earrings start at $70, that number of 70 becomes the anchor. And while it's supposed to be $70 and up our brains do a little flip and that almost becomes the budget. When you go in, you're thinking you don't want to spend more than $70. Maybe you only bring $100 with you and you're in a state where you want to get in and out for less than $70 and the whole transaction is set up pay to fail. The customer might have had a bigger budget than that, and maybe they would have been happier with a more expensive piece. But it's harder to get them there when you unintentionally set this low anchor. Here's what I would recommend saying instead. Something like the most expensive earrings in the shop are around $800, but we have a wide range of pieces to meet. Almost any budget. The average person spends around 250, but there are many options that will have you out the door for under a hundred. Now what has happened? That person is coming in prepared to spend more and excited when they see something at $70 and that's a bargain. Maybe they'll find something they love at that price, or maybe at 99 or 150. They're not limited by their brain's silly rule of thumb. And the business has the benefit of more profitable pieces moving through the store. Win win. So, you know, for the bulk of the examples in the episode, I'm just going to assume you're you're trying to navigate and negotiate for higher prices or dollar amounts. It's usually pretty easy to convince people to pay less and save money, though. I will talk a little bit about low anchors in the episode, but I'm just not going to justify why we're working on moving customers up to a higher price in every example. I'm going to simply accept that you get it and you're on board with this. Okay, so on to real estate. With big ticket items like homes, you're already working with an existing anchor that is likely unrealistic and often too low. This is the budget of what someone wants to spend, or what they spent on their last house, or if they multiply out what they're paying in rent or in their current neighborhood. Whatever. Yes, budgets matter, and I know you will be responsible. But sometimes you need the buyer to disconnect from that low anchor in their mind to be realistic about the houses they're going to be looking at, the homes that are available and what they're actually wanting to get into. With any sort of comparison shopping, you want to start with the most expensive house in the list. And while I will talk about this more in the Relativity episode, you should have a decoy house that's higher than the one you think is best for your buyers that you show them first. If the house you think is best for them is at the top of their budget. You might want to show a more expensive house something outside their budget to help set a high anchor with the neighborhood. Of course, do this with caution based on your style and each set of clients. Some will really not appreciate being shown something outside their budget, I'm sure. In that case, I don't know if many real estate agents drive their clients around to houses anymore. It used to be that you get in the car with the agent, they would take you to look at houses on a weekend or something. I'm guessing in our Google Maps world that's not as common. However, if you are driving them there, consider the path you take and what you say along the way. For example, if you drive through back roads and less expensive neighborhoods, their subconscious will notice. Instead, you could drive through the more expensive house tour nothing they're going inside to see so you aren't neglecting their budget and mention prices along the way. For example, you could say this house is a little bigger than what you were in the market for and it just sold for 950,000. And then oh, I remember working with a family who bought this home last year. It was 1.1 million and a real bargain given the size of the yard. Their family's so happy there. I just checked in with them last week and blah blah blah. It seems like idle chit chat, but their subconscious will remember the numbers when you go and show them houses for say 7, 50 or 600,000 and they will seem like a better deal. Similarly, if you work in a store of some kind, perhaps selling furniture or electronics or as I said earlier, clothes. Truly it doesn't matter. You could use this same tactic if you are taking someone to see an item. I'm going to go with the furniture example because I know I have listeners from that space. If someone is in the market for a dining room table or a sofa or a bed frame or anything else, be mindful of what you walk by on the path to what you're going to show them. Especially if the store you're in has prominent price tags. If you walk by the clearance and floor sample discount section, the items you take them to see will feel much more expensive in comparison. Instead, consider a path that walks past more expensive items along the way to help ensure the item you're showing them is a lower and more reasonable price and their mind, then it feels like a bargain instead of a stretch. If you work in the store, you have a pretty good idea. If you own the store, you could set things up in this way that you have higher prices near the front and lower prices toward the middle or inside. If you do interior design and you know you're going to be taking someone to a range of stores, you know, do your homework, go check first and plot out your path to see if that can make a difference for you. Moving on now to selling anything with a lot of options or features and available add ons. I'm going to use an example from buying a car because we're all likely very familiar with the process. There are two options to present a car to someone when they're buying it. First, you can say here's the baseline model and all the items you can add on to customize your car. Have fun, make it your own. Then you have this big long list in a checkbox or something. I remember going through that once when I was buying a car. The other option would be here is the top of the line with all the features selected, or maybe 80% of them. Go ahead and remove or add anything. You know, remove anything you don't want, add anything that you do. Do you think people end up spending the same amount in both scenarios? Of course not. People will buy more expensive vehicles and packages when presented with the second option, it has everything and remove what you don't want versus being asked to add things on. As a note, this incorporates some other concepts of behavioral economics, including defaults, perceived ownership and loss aversion. But I will not dig into those concepts here as they will all have their own episodes. Obviously, loss aversion is already done. So the lesson if you have bundled options and lots of features, price it out and present the big option and let people take away what they don't want, they'll end up with more than if they're picking a la carte. For those of you who work in multi level marketing or mlm, which is also called network marketing or referral marketing, I know your prices are often already set, so you might think this doesn't apply to you, but it does for anyone who's unfamiliar with those terms. These would be all your friends who sell for Arbonne or Cabbie or Scentsy or Duterra. You know what I'm talking about. There are a lot of people selling the same products and the prices are often set by corporate. So what do you do when you do not control the price? For one, if there are multiple levels of an item, say two or three types of shampoo or warmers or sizes of oils or whatever, make sure you present the most expensive one first and work your way down. Secondly, you can also incorporate bundles, something like a fresh face starter package or a whole home package which includes multiple items. Present them as a package with some explanation for why they go together and are right for the person you're working with and give them the option to remove what they don't want. They will likely buy more than if they're presented with everything as one off items. Speaking of bundles, I have a couple of super awesome examples from my next category Service based businesses. This is for all the coaches and consultants out there. If you like the Facebook page or follow me on social media, remember I am the brainy biz on everything social you have seen Recently a couple of stories I shared of people implementing my advice on anchoring and adjustment and relativity. Within a span of about 10 days I had two different people in service style businesses let me know how they had implemented my advice and seen amazing impact. First, while at a networking event I had a conversation with a woman named dawn who I have not worked with directly but she saw me speak about six months earlier. She let me know how my talk and the way I described anchoring and adjustment changed her business. She had a couple packages available and she sells high price tag packages starting at $5,000. She had struggled with selling those and had almost no one getting her then highest package at $10,000. So what did she do? She looked at all of what she offered and created a bundle. Her packages are not tiers as in you get level A or B or C, but they're things that could combine together. So she said to herself if someone bought all three individually it would be close to $25,000. I think it was 23 or something, I don't know exactly. So she decided to do a 20,000 bundle price if someone was to go ahead and buy all three together. Notice this did not cost her anything. She just changed the way that they were presented and added this extra layer. What happened? $10,000 packages are now flying out the door and so much easier for her to sell because the high anchor of the bundle price at $20,000 exists. So cool. Dawn was kind enough to do a live video with me at the event where we talked about this. You can go to the brainy biz page on Facebook to check it out. It's really cool. The second example was from someone who emailed me recently to let me know she had implemented my advice of creating a high anchor package in a similar fashion to what Don had done. She had always had two packages and was a little skeptical about adding a third because she was thinking it was needing to be a lower package because it wouldn't be worth her time. And for any of you out there listening, know that there's the other side too, right? You can add the high package like dawn did. So she realized that she could incorporate a higher price point instead. Unlike dawn, this person has more tiered pricing where you're picking one option of the support or coaching packages, things like that. And so she had a couple of options between 5 and $10,000. So she threw in a $20,000 package which is more work for her, but totally worth it. When you do relationship based service work for any of you that do this, you know, having someone you're checking in with more regularly, it's just really a great experience when you can. The more that you're doing with people, the more benefit they get. So this is great for her, great for the potential clients. If anybody chooses that she incorporated the offering and has already had someone take her up on that top package. How cool is that? I just love that these simple brain tricks, my advice have helped these female entrepreneurs, small business owners, to up their income and help more people without having to pay a bunch of money to build a program or write a class or a book or create a workshop. Those things take time. They were able to implement some simple anchoring and adjustment and relativity, which will be the focus of the next episode. And they saw the benefits immediately. Awesome, awesome, awesome. I just had to share with you. So now let's talk about all of you who work with in a company of whatever size one where you have an HR department, negotiate budgets each year, or maybe you're in the finance department. I know I have a lot of those people who are listening since I've spoken to some awesome CPA groups before. This applies to you too. First, for the job seekers, this is also an HR beware statement. I heard a study once and I have never been able to find it again, which makes me crazy. I think I heard it on the radio but I've not found the source. So if you know what it is, when after I share it, please please share it with me, email me or share it on Facebook. Anyway, the study had people go in and apply for jobs and when HR asked how much they wanted to make, one group made an offhanded joke of $1 million hahaha. And they all laughed and started talking about realistic numbers. It doesn't seem like this would or should impact that person's salary. If anything, you know, I would think a joke like that would be off putting, but the people who made the joke actually got offered higher salaries than those who didn't. Again, because I've not been able to find the study, I don't know the exact numbers, but I've always found that to be fascinating. So beware of those big numbers when they get thrown out because they can impact you. Which brings me to the budget request. When I worked in the credit union, I oversaw the marketing budget and had to submit a request each year. I'm sure many of you have experience with that. And this can go both ways, both as the requester and the budget maker, and similar with any negotiation where they say the person who speaks first, the first person to put out a number, you know you're essentially setting the new terms right. So keep the that in mind. In this example, I'm going to use this for the finance folks on that side since like I said, I know there are some of you listening. So let's say someone asks for a certain budget in the annual planning session. This is their anchor, but it also becomes yours if you're not prepared. Let's say if most departments get 100 to 200,000 and someone put down a request for 500,000, you might not think it would impact you, but in most cases they'll end up with a higher than average budget because your brain will adjust down from that high point. In the reverse, if you're trying to cut budget, don't be afraid to suggest a low but realistic number when asking for someone to create their budget request. They will likely use this number as an anchor and come in lower on their request request even though they're going to adjust up. What about those travel or training requests? If you have to go to your boss and ask for budget for something, you can use this too. Similar to my two personal anecdotes, the stories from just a minute ago, I also had someone reach out to me after a presentation to let me know how they had been able to use anchoring and adjustment to help make a case for a conference that she wanted to attend that was a little more expensive than usual. Instead of doing the all too common sheepish request, which almost never works, you know the one I know this will be a little more expensive than we usually do. It might be out of budget, but I think it could be good. And it's okay if you say no, but. But I think I would get value. Whatever. Don't do that. Take the tips from our friend here. She used the anchoring and adjustment approach. Let's say her Perfect conference was $2,500. She found a similar conference that she could also attend which was more expensive, let's say $4,000. In the meeting with her boss she said something to the tune of I found a conference which covers all the learning you've said you want me to gain next year. It's $4,000. That seemed a little high to me. So I have another option. It will cover most of the same items, all the key ones for sure and it's only 2, 500. What do you think happened? Well, she sent me a message letting me know it worked and she was registered for the two thousand five hundred dollar conference she wanted to attend. I had one low anchor example in there for you if you remember, with those finance folks trying to decrease budget requests. Another low anchor example would be when you want to show how little time something can take. These would be all those ads like Learn Italian in just 5 minutes a day or 10 minute abs or 15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance. These low anchors can be helpful, but you need to be absolutely sure the claim is true and I mean all the time. Because if it isn't, you're at a huge risk of the bait and switch brain reaction where people get angry and boycott you and your product. Let me dig into one of these and show you what this looks like. As with most of you, I'm sure my experience with learning a language is mostly from classes that in high school and I think of it as a very labor intensive process. At least an hour at a time because that's how long classes were and very tedious. So my mental hurdle to overcome is around the hour mark. Anything less than that would be great. And if it was 15 minutes a day, I would probably be happy assuming I'm in the market to learn the language. However, if you promise me five minutes and it takes ten, my brain will quickly revolt and rebel about how you lied to me and you do not want to be in that space. So be careful with the low anchors. My final example is for the nonprofits or any fundraising efforts you might be going into. I've served on several boards in my time, so I'm no stranger to fundraising and auction events. I remember before one such event the board was discussing the cards we were going to put on the tables at this fundraising event and if we should include a suggested donation amount and if so, what number to use. Sound familiar? This was before my extensive research work into behavioral economics and if I was having that conversation now, I would know exactly what to say Go High. But as with so many of these examples, at the time we felt the need to base that number on something. The average donation from the year before at the event, or how much we wanted to make in total divided by the number of people at the event. We didn't want to ask for too much. And you fear that making a suggestion that's too high will turn people off. But that's not what the studies show, unless you're going extreme and ridiculous. So in our case, I think the year before was the first time the organization had put a suggested donation out there and it was for $25. So what happened? A lot of $25 donations. So we decided to up it to 50. What happened? A lot of $50 donations. What if we had suggested $100? This anchor can encourage people to bump up what they would have donated because they start at that higher number. But know of course that this varies with the group and organization. If you put out a crazy number like 5,000, an event where most people give 50, it will likely not have the same impact. However, have you ever been to an event with a live auction? I've been to a lot of these over the years and recently people have started doing the auction for cash donations. Have you seen this? It? So it's the sort of transition from instead of the cards on the table, you do these in the live auction. So let's say there's a live auction with only a few very expensive items up for auction. If you have 200 people in the room and 10 items in the live auction, a lot of attendees will not have a chance to donate and you could lose out. And that's where you do those cards. However, if you do the live auction version of the suggested donation, it can encourage more donations at higher amounts because no one wants to be the only person in the room or at their table who doesn't raise their card. This is an example of groupthink, a concept for another day as well. But to use anchoring, if you do this, make sure you start with the highest number and work your way down. And this is a good time to work with a high end donor to get them to commit in advance. For example, if you have someone who you know donates $10,000 each year, ask them if they're willing to make that donation at the live auction. Then when you or whomever, your auctioneer stands up and says, if there's Anyone at the $10,000 level, raise your cards now. And you know at least one person will, which will set a high Anchor for everyone else and get them thinking about how much they can donate and when to jump in. Someone who might have done 2,500 is now considering jumping in at the $5,000 level so they don't look cheap compared to that other donation. And you know, you work your way all the way down to the 25s or 50s or whatever your your minimum is. And those people can jump in as well. I was once at an event where the first number was something ridiculous like $250,000 and they had somebody ready to go. It was one of those celebrity chef events where it was $2,500 a plate or something. It was so much a much higher end event, but they used this method and I'm sure it helped with the donations they received all the way along. It was really amazing to watch. So when in doubt, throw out those big numbers. Really, what have you got to lose? So what got your brain buzzing as you learned about anchoring today? For me, anchoring is such a key concept when it comes to business. Whether you're negotiating a contract or asking for budget, or even thinking about how to respond to an RFP or do a verbal pitch, the way you set your anchors is critical in how someone feels about the offer and and their choices. As this episode Originally aired in 2018, it was just the 11th ever episode of the show. There's so much that has come out since, and while I have continued to add new examples over time, there are some that have held up and are still my go to's after so many years. Like the Snickers study you heard me talk about here today. This example resonates so well with people that I still constantly use it as an example when I'm a guest on podcasts or doing presentations. And it just resonates in a way that people really remember. There are so many ways to apply anchoring that it's easy to ruminate on the options and never really use it. So to avoid that, I recommend you pick one thing right now where you're going to intentionally use anchoring in the next week. This can be professional. Maybe you have a pitch coming up. Or you can look for an opportunity to rewrite something on your website, or an ad, or an email. Or it could be something personal. I will never forget. Once years ago, I had someone in an audience at a corporate training I was doing. Say he was excited to test out anchoring with his wife. He was wanting them to take a trip to Las Vegas and it had been hard to convince her of the need for the trip in the past. So he said that he wanted to try suggesting that they go to Vegas for a week or 10 days and see if she came back with something like, like let's just do three or four nights. You can see how this is a little bit different when you have that high anchor versus just saying, hey, let's go to Vegas this weekend, right? So the options are endless with anchoring. Test it out, see what works and what doesn't and come share it with me on social media. You'll find me as the brainy biz pretty much everywhere and as Melina Palmer on LinkedIn. And to make it easy, there are links in the show notes along with links to my top recommended past episodes, books, a timestamp summary of the episode, and more. It's all waiting for you in the app you're listening to and@the brainybusiness.com 394 and just like that, episode 394 on anchoring and adjustment is done. Join me Friday for a brand new episode with Kwame Christian. It's going to be a lot of fun. You don't want to miss it it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me. And remember to be thoughtful. Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.