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Marketing Strategy For Sweet Tea, And Unsweetened Iced Tea

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There are times when I simply cannot decide between sweetened iced tea, and unsweetened iced tea, but offering me a third option (that is most similar to one of the sweetened levels for example, ¼ sweet tea mixed with ¾ unsweet) to aid my decision making process has been a well-documented marketing strategy for years. Introducing a “decoy” (or dominated alternative) helps consumers narrow their focus on the simpler choice. However, choosing sweet tea may involve giving up the fewer-calorie-healthier-for-me option found in the unsweet tea, and this can cause conflicts in my process that result in an absence of the decoy’s intended benefit. Choosing the sort of iced beverage I consume on a hot day has little significance compared to the sort of person I deem approachable enough to get into a car with. How does a dominated alternative fair in the world of approachability? Based on just a photo, and knowing relatively nothing about the person you are looking at, would a third option help you lean in favor of one or the other?
Research on the decoy effect (asymmetrical dominance, or attraction effect) has held its own in the world of marketing for the last three decades. Huber, Payne, and Puto (1982) demonstrated that the choices people make between a target, and a competitive option, can be swayed toward choosing the target, when an inconsequential third option (that is over shadowed by the target) is added to the choice set. Huber et al., designed their study to demonstrate

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