future for margarine. Louis said, ‘Let’s go at this more
indirectly.’
Now the question of how to increase sales of margarine was
much clearer. Cheskin told his client to call their product
Imperial Margarine, so they could put an impressive-looking
crown on the package. As he had learned at the luncheon, the
color was critical: he told them the margarine had to be yellow.
Then he told them to wrap it in foil, because in those days foil
was associated with high quality. And sure enough, if they gave
someone two identical pieces of bread — one buttered with
white margarine and the other buttered with foil-wrapped
yellow Imperial Margarine — the second piece of bread won
hands-down in taste tests every time. “You never ask anyone,
‘Do you want foil or not?’ because the answer is always going
to be ‘I don’t know’ or ‘Why would I?’ says Masten. “You just
ask them which tastes better, and by that indirect method you
get a picture of what their true motivations are.”
The Cheskin company demonstrated a particularly elegant
example of sensation transference a few years ago, when they
studied two competing brands of inexpensive brandy, Christian
Brothers and E & J (the latter of which, to give some idea of the
market segment to which the two belong, is known to its