| The phenomenon of having products in a lineup which are never meant to sell is well known to marketers. The exact name for it escapes me just now. Basically, the logic goes: 1. Find a feature that is easily differentiable and cheap to create. 2. Differentiate on that feature for a relatively small markup. It'll be almost pure profit. In software this is easy as a few named constants in your source code or some entries in a database table. So for example, last time I looked The Economist had three subscription types: Paper, Digital, Paper & Digital. They priced the Paper and the Paper & Digital plans identically. Why? Because the contrast between P/P&D made P&D more attractive. It increases sales of the P&D plan and, overall, improves the total profit on the deal. There are many other businesses where "sacrificial lambs" are created to sell the outlying plans. As usual I refer folks to The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing for details. |