In the eye of the beholder

Yesterday I watched a TV program about marketing, the art of seducing a potential buyer.
Now, I'll be the first one to admit that I'm very easily influenced by advertising. Just like the expert in the program said, I take it all in; packaging texture, material, colour scheme. I quite often read the information on products: sugar content on breakfast products, country of origin for fish, vegetables and fruit. I like to look for environmental labels on washing powder, and compare the magical agents on shampoo (generally the same, if listed). I try to buy organic juice and filmjölk (fermented milk). And I'd like to be able to say that these considerations always control my purchases. Of course, they don't. Even when I very consciously compare prices and painstakingly calculate the actual price per litre/kg, I have to admit to sometimes buying the more expensive brand, because of vague and probably mistaken notions of "superior" or "genuine" quality.
Which is why I wasn't terribly surprised at one of the experiments in the program. Five persons, all employed in shops themselves, were sent into one supermarket to find
1) a cheap breakfast cereal
2) organic coffee
4) a "luxury" bar of chocolate
5) a carton of sweet fruit juice

I'm guessing they were instructed not to dwell in the shelf, and as a result they almost invariably presented the same five brands (previously predicted by the marketing expert) from their shopping trolleys...the cheap cereal had a simplistic packaging with no pictures, just large, bright letters. The "organic" coffee was packaged in a brown folded paper bag with a green label, but lacked any formal indication of organic content. The chocolate bar was wrapped in burgundy paper with a picture of a strawberry and subtle golden text.

The next experiment was almost hilarious. A person was placed with one of those familiar sampling stands in a shopping centre, and offered bypassers to try two different brands of soft drinks. The bottles stood on each side of him, both with black paper cylinders covering the real labels. The labels on his right side were decorated with white triangles whereas the ones on his left had white circles.
People who tried the drinks generally found that the one with circles was sweeter and tasted nicer, and the one with triangles was more bitter or sour; it was usually perceived as a diet version. Of course, the bottles held exactly the same drink (one which I don't particularly like, but it's a fairly common domestic brand).
This hints at the complex psychological processes going on all the time, with consumers trying to be intelligent and conscious buyers. Even when faced with identical products, we try to distinguish them, and appreciate being told, be it with golden print or "natural" wrapping, that this product is something else. When sampling wine, we like to know that the cabernet sauvignon or the merlot has a distinctive bouquet of manure and wood fires, even though we're not sure how that flavour got into our very expensive wine or why this is necessarily a good thing.