Unit-price anchoring affects consumer purchasing behavior

Anchoring is a method of influencing consumers’ purchasing decisions by providing numerical suggestions. This study aims to determine if order-effect anchoring works in stores to increase revenue. We hypothesized that a unit-price anchor (“2 for $4”) would lead to the most sales and therefore the most revenue, followed by the price-unit (“$4 for 2”) and single-price ($2 each) anchors. Previous research suggests consumers rely on external information like anchors found in advertisements, to help them make the shopping experience more efficient. While prior research has demonstrated order-effect anchors can increase sales, few studies have established this pattern among adolescent shoppers. We conducted an experiment using 29 high school students in grades 11-12, who shopped in a pretend store three different times, each time with a different anchor imposed on them. We found that unit-price anchoring produced more revenue than the single-price anchor when applied to all items in a store, not just individual categories such as chips or just drinks. Our data suggests that unit-price anchoring works best when applied across multiple categories of items, compared to individual categories, and is an effective revenue-generating anchor.