Grant McCracken:

Round prices ($10.00) are the work of, um, rounding. We don’t suppose that a new product comes out at $10.00. Someone rounded to make things simpler. Consumers read and react to round prices in a variety of ways, some predictable, some not.

Sharp prices ($18.37) are “real(er)” numbers. We suppose they represent a more faithful reckoning of the accidents of production or profit calculation.

Forget pricing, all marketing used to round. Products, brands, communications, were all simplified to make things easier. This was an important part of marketing’s “value add.” This meant that entire decades were rounded. I give you the 1950s. This meant that there could be only one, unique selling proposition. This meant keeping it simple (stupid) and repeating ourselves endlessly.

Now we’re all, as consumers, a little more like Eric. We have better pattern detection skills and we find brands and communications that are rounded a little tedious. We want commercial creations that resist interpretation…at least at first. When it comes to new products, innovations, and ads, we want manageable difficulty. We want to find the patterns, not have them imposed upon us.