Marketing may do more than persuade consumers to buy a product. For a glass of wine, at least, pricing tactics may actually make people enjoy the drink more.

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Becca del Monte

A recent study by Graduate School of Business Prof. Baba Shiv found that people's perception of a wine's quality is directly related to its price.

A joint Stanford-California Institute of Technology (Caltech) research study has demonstrated that “marketing actions, such as changes in the price of a product, can affect neural representations of experienced pleasantness.” In other words, according to the study, mental expectations of a wine’s flavor appear to drive physical experiences of it.

The authors of the study had participants drink samples of wine, differentiated only by price. The same wine was labeled as both “$10 wine” and “$90 wine,” and another wine was used as both “$5 wine” and “$45 wine.” A third variety was priced as “$35 wine.” fMRI scanning of the patients’ brains showed increased pleasure for the subject with wine labeled at a higher price.

“We always have known that price influences perceptions of quality,” said Graduate School of Business Prof. Baba Shiv, one of the study’s authors. “What we were curious about, now that we know this, is whether this perception benefit is just psychological, or whether price can influence the true pleasure.”

The findings confirmed the hypothesis of the researchers, but Shiv admitted that the result was counter-intuitive.

“If you think about it, the brain should only be influenced by the core components of the wine — its chemical composition. It should not be influenced by something like price,” Shiv said. “But in the study we found a functional change in activity in different areas of the brain despite the same chemicals being experienced.”

“It’s very surprising,” he added.

Wine provided an ideal medium for the study, as small quantities allowed for the difficult logistics of scanning brain activity to remain manageable. It also hit on one of Shiv’s personal areas of interest.

“I’ve always been intrigued that people spent so much for a bottle of wine. You can get pretty good wine for about $2, and people sometimes pay $200. I’ve wondered about that sort of relationship between more pleasure and more expense, and what’s driving that in some cases.”

Two of the co-authors were affiliated with Stanford before going to Caltech; Hilke Plassmann worked at Stanford as a postdoctoral researcher, while Antonio Rangel worked as an economist at the University.

“The big lesson is not about wine and price, it’s about human experience,” Rangel said. “People have always thought the quality of an experience depended on the experience itself. For wine, that would be what you were drinking, whether you were thirsty. But we’ve found as well that an important factor is the belief and expectations surrounding it.”

“To me, that’s a beautiful lesson,” he added.