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2B Tuning in

Understanding numbers and what they mean is critical. If you calculate numbers and get answers, you always need to check they are correct and that they make sense. One common mistake can be getting the decimal point in the wrong place – like we saw with the concrete mixer story in Chapter 1!

Epic Fail 1: The Third Pound Burger Flop in America

In the 1980s, the American fast-food chain A&W decided to try to compete with McDonald’s Quarter Pounder hamburger by releasing and advertising its own numerically named hamburger – the Third Pound burger. The Third Pound burger was larger in size but was offered at the same price as the Quarter Pounder. It even outperformed the Quarter Pounder in blind taste tests. The A&W advertisers pushed these two facts hard in their ‘Third is the Word’ advertising campaign and expected big sales, considering the burger’s larger size. However, the Third Pound burger flopped, and A&W stopped making the burger shortly after its launch. A&W’s owners were dumbfounded – why would consumers choose to buy a smaller burger for the same price of their bigger Third Pound burger?

A&W did some research and ran focus groups to discover the reason for the hamburgers failure. The result was a shock – most participants thought onethird of a pound was actually smaller than one-quarter

In other words, consumers failed to understand the maths and mistakenly thought they were buying less meat for the same price.