Place Your Target Plan in the Center

What's the optimal location for a pricing plan?

Choices are guided by the central gaze cascade effect (Atalay et al., 2012).

Upon viewing options, your eyes immediately go to the center. But you still need to view the adjacent options, so you look left. Then right. During these eye movements, you cross over the central options multiple times.

Those fixations trigger a feedback loop:

• More fixations? More liking.
• More liking? More fixations.

Marketers could place their target plans in the middle of an assortment.

Or retailers could stock high ROI products on middle shelves (71% of shoppers choose from the middle two rows; Christenfeld, 1995).

Caveats

• Aim to Be First or Last in a Sequence. Do you show products individually? First positions are stickier in long-term memory, while final positions are stickier in working memory (see Miller & Campbell, 1959).

• Atalay, A. S., Bodur, H. O., & Rasolofoarison, D. (2012). Shining in the center: Central gaze cascade effect on product choice. Journal of Consumer Research, 39(4), 848-866.
• Christenfeld, N. (1995). Choices from identical options. Psychological Science, 6(1), 50-55.
• Miller, N., & Campbell, D. T. (1959). Recency and primacy in persuasion as a function of the timing of speeches and measurements. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 59(1), 1.