Most of our decisions and judgements get attached to arbitrary facts and figures and become anchored to our perceived reality by completely irrelevant detail.  This is particularly true when we are working with very limited information..
The most common example of this is the word: “Reduced”.   Wine in supermarkets is often seen to be reduced from £7 to £4 and this can enhance sales.  What we don’t know is that this is a £3.50 bottle of plonk which has been advertised at £7 for a month or two, and is now “reduced” to £4.
This linking of reality to irrelevant facts is known as “Anchoring” and is virtually impossible to shake off once it is implanted in our brains.
Much of the time these anchored facts are not facts at all - as in the case of the bottle of wine which was never “really” a £7 bottle of wine at all.   In one of the most famous examples President Eisenhower in the US asked his advisers to report to him on the best ways of overcoming poverty and deprivation in order to make the United States a more just and equal society.  His advisers told him to look at Sweden, a country with limited natural resources which had done wonders for its population through a programme of social democracy based around high taxation.
The left-leaning Sweden was not the model he was looking for however, and so Eisenhower told his advisers to stop talking about Sweden.  Suddenly he said, “look what good that socialism did them - highest suicide rate in the world”.   The statement was completely untrue, but the slur stuck and for many years anyone who wanted to denigrate European social democracy trotted out this made up statistic.
Of course in advertising one cannot simply make up facts about one’s rivals, but opinions do need to be anchored somewhere.   Beer makers have used the approach by calling some brands “Export” while spreading the rumour that beer for export is stronger beer than the weak stuff sold on the home market.  (This plays on the notion among some Britain’s that Britain is an over-regulated country while on the continent everyone is free to do as they please).
This article is taken from a series of pieces on the psychology of advertising which appears on the Theory of Direct Mail web site – probably the largest collection of serious articles on direct mail that is available anywhere.   It’s available on [1] www.theory.bz