Stella Artois once ingeniously convinced us to pay more for its average beer by marketing it as “reassuringly expensive”. It was honest, at least, unlike Kenwood, which might otherwise have sold its ubiquitous Kenwood Chef food mixer as “reassuringly heavy”.
Sir Kenneth Grange, who redesigned Ken Wood’s original mixer in the 1960s (and created more besides, from Kodak cameras to Intercity trains), has revealed that he made the appliance with a particularly heavy material to give it a sense of quality.
“We read a lot into the weight of things so, when you pick something up, in that moment you make an assumption about its value,” the inventor says in The Brits Who Designed the Modern World, a BBC documentary.
It’s a neat psychological trick of the sort manufacturers and marketeers often use when convincing us to buy stuff.
The overweight phone
Unscrew the handset of your landline phone (remember those?) and you’ll find a metal weight inside. As phones got lighter, manufacturers had to add heft to make them pleasant to use (and to trigger the cradle switch). In 1988, market research in the US found that consumers preferred a 176g handset with weight balanced at its centre.
The addictive lip balm
Debate has raged about whether some people are addicted to lip balm for habitual or chemical reasons. But, as Martin Lindstrom recounts in his book, Brandwashed, many balms contain superfluous ingredients such as menthol, which has been shown to have addictive qualities in cigarettes, and phenol, which can actually make lips drier, necessitating frequent rebalming.
The happy beer
You probably haven’t spent much time studying the label on a bottle of Heineken, but the logo changed subtly in the 1960s. The letters e in the name used to have flat crossbar, as they normally do. Alfred Heineken changed that so each e slopes upwards to the right, suddenly taking on the form of smiling, thirsty little Pacmen that want nothing more than to have a beer with you.
