Seven Pricing Options Can Make the Premium Choice Feel Ordinary.

A $1,400 package can look extravagant when it stands alone beside a basic and a standard option. Give buyers several neighboring premium choices, however, and the expensive end of the range may begin to feel less unusual. New research in the Journal of Consumer Research suggests that customers do not judge an offer only by its price and features. They also judge how normal that offer appears within the assortment around it. For a business designing services, subscriptions or product lines, the arrangement of choices may influence demand before any discount is offered.

The paper, by Marissa Sharif, Elizabeth Webb and Sudeep Bhatia, reports six studies involving 9,377 participants. Its central finding challenges a familiar pricing assumption: the middle option does not always keep its usual advantage when each tier contains several similar choices.

The Middle Option Has a Hidden Advantage

Customers often avoid the cheapest and most expensive choices in a three-option set. The least expensive can feel risky; the most expensive can feel excessive. The middle becomes an easy compromise because it avoids both extremes. Researchers call this extremeness aversion.

That pattern helps explain the popularity of good-better-best pricing. A consulting firm can offer a basic audit, a standard engagement and a premium transformation. A buyer who lacks a strong prior preference can justify the standard package without feeling cheap or indulgent. The structure quietly makes the middle feel reasonable.

But a three-option menu is only one kind of marketplace. Real customers may compare dozens of laptops across several stores, several membership levels from competing studios or a long list of service packages before arriving at one company’s final offer. The new research asked what happens when every tier contains multiple similar options instead of one.

Repetition Changes What Feels Normal

Across the studies, exposure to several similar options at the low, middle and high ends made people more likely to choose an extreme. The researchers argue that repetition changed “category typicality”—the customer’s sense of what normally belongs in that market.

In one water-bottle study, participants saw either one option at each price-and-capacity level or four colors of the same bottle at every level. Extreme choices rose from 53.0% in the three-option condition to 65.1% in the larger assortment. The prices and capacities had not become more attractive. The high and low ends simply looked more representative of the category.

A restaurant experiment revealed an important boundary. When participants imagined choosing dinner near home—an ordinary occasion—multiple similar choices increased selection of the low or high extreme from 41.7% to 60.0%. When participants imagined dining in a city they were unlikely to revisit, the effect weakened. For a unique occasion, being unusual can be part of the appeal; for an ordinary purchase, familiarity carries more weight.

This Is Not Permission to Clutter the Menu

The result is tempting to convert into a trick: add more expensive packages and wait for premium sales to rise. That would overstate the evidence. The authors explicitly note the costs of adding products, the risk that similar offers cannibalize one another and the possibility that customer segments react differently.

More choices also create work. Each option needs a clear operational reason, understandable differences and a reliable delivery path. Three nearly identical packages with invented names can make a business look evasive. The useful lesson is not “manufacture decoys.” It is that an assortment communicates what the business considers normal.

An isolated premium offer says, “This is exceptional.” A coherent premium family can say, “Customers regularly solve this class of problem at this level.” That message must be true. If the business cannot explain why the neighboring options exist, the structure is decoration rather than strategy.

Build Tiers Around Customer Jobs

Start by separating price from purpose. A professional service might discover that its premium customers are not one group: some need faster delivery, some need broader execution and others need deeper measurement. Those can become genuinely distinct premium configurations with similar economic value, rather than one overloaded package that appears designed only for rare buyers.

Then test the assortment, not just the price. Compare which tier customers choose, where they abandon, which questions they ask, the margin each configuration produces and whether buyers understand the differences. A higher premium mix is not automatically a win if fulfillment costs rise faster or customers choose the wrong package.

OrionPilot’s useful role in this kind of decision is connecting the offer structure to campaign language and measured response, so a pricing change becomes a learning cycle rather than a permanent guess.

The Neighbors Help Define the Price

The most practical insight from the study is simple: an offer does not carry its meaning alone. The choices beside it—and even choices a customer saw earlier—help determine whether it feels ordinary, risky or excessive.

Before reducing the price of an underperforming premium offer, inspect the category you have built around it. The problem may not be that customers reject the value. They may see one lonely option and conclude, without being told, that it was not made for an ordinary business like theirs.