According to the Journal of Consumer Research, Inc., your average Joe is more likely to trust a company when fine-grained numbers, as opposed to rounded numbers, are involved in “quantitative expressions.” Our guess is that these “expressions,” are a fancy way of saying marketing and advertising lingo.
This study makes us feel like we’ve been ahead of the game all along (unknowingly). See, we usually share in our catalogs the number of items sold for several products. Just take a look at snippets from our Spring 2012 catalog:
Another interesting factoid from the study:
“Not surprisingly, recipients prefer narrow intervals, which provide more information. Moreover, they are willing to sacrifice formal accuracy for informational value. For example, when the true value is $22.5 billion, 80% of participants prefer the estimate ‘$18–$20 billion’ over the estimate ‘$20–40 billion,’ even though the latter interval includes the correct value, and the former does not (Yaniv and Foster 1995).”
Case in point: precision is pleasing, plain and simple. And so is alliteration.