Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant - always yours

UNDERSTANDING BRAND RELEVANCE 59
thus did not create the same emotions in the social setting as
Heineken.
Such associations as the area or country of origin also affect
the frame of a set of options. In one study, one set of diners was
given glasses of wine from a new North Dakota winery named
Noah Winery. 14 Another set had the identical experience, but
the same wine was purported to be from California rather than
North Dakota. The former group not only enjoyed their wine
more but believed their food tasted better, ate 11 percent more
of it, and spent 15 percent more time at the table — perhaps
because the enjoyment of the wine made them want to prolong
the eating experience. None believe the wine label infl uenced
them in any way.
The Scope of the Offering — Adding Options
One competitive strategy is to reduce the number of competitors
by defi ning the category or subcategory to minimize the number
of relevant options. However, there are contexts in which
expanding the number of options can actually by helpful. That
is the case with the inferior alternative effect and the compromise
effect.
The appeal of a brand can be enhanced if an inferior alternative
is included in the consideration set. Williams-Sonoma,
the upscale kitchen appliance store for people into cooking,
offered a home bread bakery priced at $ 275. When they added
a larger unit priced at 50 percent higher, it did not sell signifi -
cantly, but sales of the original item nearly doubled. The original
bakery seemed more reasonably priced when there was a
high - priced alternative that was inferior because of its size. This
phenomenon has been replicated in many experimental contexts.
For example, in a classic study, Simonson and Tversky
gave one experimental group a choice between $ 6 and an elegant
Cross pen and found that 36 percent chose the Cross pen. 15
In another experimental group, when a second, less - appealing