Got your attention? Now, before some start harping on bringing religion into this bear with me.
We've all read the reviews about how Lexicon dropped an OPPO into a fancy case and how it was subjectively better. I imagine we'll be hearing similar stories about how NuForce or Ayre or someone else is using the OPPO guts and moving this here, that there, adding a little extra of this or that.
But there are many similarities between what's done here and what's done in other areas where senses are called into play in making a purchasing decision. Let's talk about brandy.
A number of years ago, Christian Brothers ruled the roost when it came to inexpensive brandies. They had good enough product placement, name recognition, and a history that spoke to their quality. Well quality in that particular price segment, anyways. Well, it came to pass that they noticed that their sales were going down and they were losing market share to someone they'd never lost it to before. That someone was E&J. Just to give you an idea of the market we're talking about here, E&J is often referred to as Easy Jesus (See? It's not really about religion
).
This threw Christian Brothers into a panic. They sent people into stores everywhere around the country to try and figure things out. Was it price? No. Was E&J positioning themselves better in the stores? No. Was there some sort of enhanced advertising campaign going on by E&J? No. This trend had to be understood and being understood, it had to be reversed. Since the folks at CB couldn't figure it out and they wanted quick results, they hired a company that was founded by Louis Cheskin. Cheskin was an expert in sensation transferrence as well as conducting scientific inquiries into the matter of sensory preference. The company was charged with solving the problem.
The first thing that was done was that he gathered up 200 brandy drinkers and conducted a blind test. The result was that there was no decided preference for one brand over the other. OK, so it's not taste. Then he got another 200 brandy drinkers and this time he told them which glass contained CB and which contained E&J. This time, there was a preference for CB. That meant that just invoking the name CB was enough to skew the results in their favor. But, this still didn't answer the question of declining market share. If people naturally gravitated to CB why wasn't this being reflected in actual sales? So, Cheskin dug deeper.
He got another group of brandy drinkers and this time he did the test just like the second time but with one important difference. He displayed the bottles for all to see. Now the preference swung the other way to E&J. This indicated that the problem was the packaging. Now, way back then the bottles looked different than they do today. The CB bottle looked very much like a wine bottle and had an unassuming label. E&J on the other hand used a more decorative bottle. It kind of looked like a decanter, had a nice bit of foil on top, the glass was a bit smokey in color, and the label was more ornate and textured.
To confirm this was the case, they got another 200 people and this time they Christian Brothers was poured out of the E&J bottle, while the E&J was poured out of the Christian Brothers bottle. The results were that CB won and won by the biggest margin. Christian Brothers took the results and just redesigned the bottle and suddenly their market share was back up.
Now, Lexicon and OPPO are in two very different market segments with a price differential of 7x. Even though you know they're the same, they're packaged in different bottles. And that's what the reviewer saw when he reviewed the Lexicon. There was a sensation transferrence that occured. There was the sensation of the brand name itself being transferred to his impression as well as the general appearance, heft, and whatever else. That was enough to skew his perceptions but as we have seen from the above example, matters can be quite different when we don't know what we're drinking or in the case of Lexicon, when we don't know what we're listening to.
