07.30.06
Idle marketing thought
Selling things in 10s or 100s sort of makes sense, especially if you’re competing on price and your price is good: the potential customer can immediately compute the price per unit. But perhaps you want to raise the price…. (Not that anyone ever would, of course.)
I’d think about packaging in 11s or dozens: harder to do the mental arithmetic. The ad copy could even proclaim “NOW 11! (or 12!) instead of 10.” And you could go to a higher per-unit price, secure in the knowledge that most potential customers can’t mentally divide by 11 or 12. (13 is a bad idea: unlucky.)
Of course, then you’ll have to deal with customers who complained that there were not in fact 11 factorial items in the package. (11! = 11 factorial = 11 x 10 x 9 x … x 3 x 2 x 1 — math joke. Heh heh. Get it?)
Just had a flashback: remember the electric guitar in Spinal Tap whose volume knob went to 11 instead of 10? One louder, as the guitarist explained.
