steak and beer Sunday

I am having a 500ml can of Tiger and a black pepper steak from Tanglin Halt Western Food (highly recommended by Ch U) as I'm writing this. It's not as if my blog has not been reduced to an irrelevant record of the minutiae in my life, but I'm fascinated by what Tim Hartford, author of The Undercover Economist, said about how supermarkets place their merchandise to make the most profit. Thanks to him, I decided to pay less for a 500ml can of beer instead of a pricier 330ml.

A 330ml can of Tiger costs $3.40, while a 500ml can costs $4.60. The smaller can works out to cost 12% more for the same volume. According to Hartford, the rationale for having two prices for the same thing is to differentiate between those willing to pay more and the "price-sensitive" customers like me who'd rather pay less to kill their brain cells.

7/11 placed the 330ml cans inside its fridges at the eye-level, which is really the first thing you'll find if you're looking for beer there. If you don't bother about how much the beer costs, you'll probably pick your favourite beer and then proceed to the counter. But I was feeling thrifty (read:broke) and started comparing prices: Heineken-$3.75, check; and I noticed the 500ml-cans placed right at the top. Voila, a quick calculation and I knew which was a better deal. Thanks Tim!

Anyway I recommend The Undercover Economist if you wanna read "Econs for Dummies"-like books and discover answers to questions like "Who pays for your coffee?" and "Why poor countries are poor?". Other than Tim Hartford, I also enjoyed books by Steven Levitt(Freakonomics) and Steven Landsburg(More sex is safer sex) who make econs interesting for the rest of us. =)

be different

I just finished marketing guru Jack Trout's Differentiate or Die, a random book I borrowed. The core of it is companies must stay different in people's minds and he furnishes his case with many real world examples. His idea seems so obvious though; everyday the media is telling me to be different/original/unique/etc until it sounds like a cliche.
But the point Trout makes is that you just have to position yourself in a unique spot in the mind, and once you're there it takes a lot to dislodge your place. Any attribute can be differentiated. Like if you're no.1/low-cost/luxury/etc and people know it, you just keep working on that special attribute of yours.
To see brands how brands are exploiting this idea, I paid closer attention to the ads on the streets over the past few days. True enough, Nescafe is positioning itself as the fat-free coffee, pre-empting other coffeemakers the fact coffee powder doesn't contain fat. Going by Trout's analysis, if the "fat-free" campaign is successful, any other coffeemaker trying to use the "fat-free" attribute would be seen as copycats.
I wonder how many of my consumption choices are influenced by these marketing tactics.