When Dietrich Mateschitz developed the Red Bull energy drink, one of the biggest commercial risks wasn’t the creation of an energy drink, it was the comparison consumers would make. Put a brand-new drink in a standard 330ml can – next to Coke and Pepsi – and you immediately invite the shopper to do a simple, brutal calculation:
“Why is this drink twice the price of a Coke?”
So Red Bull didn’t just launch a new drink. It launched a totally different reference point. They changed the shape of the can so that it was no longer small and squat, but tall, thin and elegant. In fact, they even made it smaller in volume!
The tall, slim 250ml can wasn’t an aesthetic flourish. It was a pricing and perception strategy. By breaking visual similarity with soft drinks, Red Bull avoided being mentally grouped with them. It didn’t look like a fizzy drink. It didn’t feel like one. It wasn’t even measured in the same way by the buyer. Buyers weren’t comparing ml per £. They were buying a “unit of energy”.
That single design decision shifted the value frame. And once the frame changes, price becomes negotiable. This is the core trick behind modern value perception: companies don’t compete on price, they compete on what you compare them to.
Humans judge relative value, not value itself
Most marketing theory dresses this up with words like anchoring, framing and contextual pricing. In real life, it’s much simpler. People ask, often subconsciously, “What does this belong next to?” Red Bull made sure the answer was not “Coke and Fanta”.
Once it resided in a new mental category – performance, alertness, lifestyle, sport, night-life – the usual rules of drink pricing stopped applying. A smaller product at a higher price became normal, even logical. The can is doing a huge amount of psychological work before you’ve even popped the ring pull.
This is the uncomfortable part for buyers. Brands don’t primarily try to convince you that their product is cheap. They try to make sure you compare it to the right thing. If you control the comparison, you control perceived value. Which brings us neatly to a much quieter, and frankly more cynical, example.
Non-alcoholic “craft gin” is a masterclass in perception engineering
A standard craft gin might sit around £30 a bottle. A non-alcoholic craft gin will often be around £20. On the surface, that feels fair. After all, there’s no alcohol, therefore no alcohol duty. There’s no need for the same production controls, no lengthy ageing process to worry about, and no alcohol content to justify a premium.
The buyer sees the price and thinks: “Good. It’s cheaper. That makes sense.” This is exactly the reaction the brand wants. But the blunt reality is you are not buying gin without alcohol. You are buying a botanical cordial, a flavoured liquid. Water, extracts, stabilisers and aroma compounds that are engineered to resemble gin when mixed with tonic.
The production costs are fundamentally closer to a soft drink than a spirit. Yet the packaging, bottle weight, glass shape, branding language and shelf placement are lifted directly from premium spirits. The product borrows the comparison frame of a £30 bottle of gin. Then it politely undercuts it at £20. And that £10 gap is doing something very powerful, it reassures us.
We feel we’re getting the “expected discount” for removing the alcohol, which makes £20 feel reasonable – even generous! In truth, we’re still paying £20 for what is, functionally, a cordial. The saving isn’t real value, it’s merely a psychological bridge between two very different cost realities.
This isn’t about deception. It’s about leverage.
To be clear, none of this requires lying. Red Bull really is an energy drink. Non-alcoholic gin really is non-alcoholic. The labels are accurate.
The exploitation happens at the level of comparison, not claims. Marketing doesn’t need to tell you something untrue. It only needs to place the product next to something more expensive. Once that anchor is set, your judgement shifts automatically. You stop asking: “What does this cost to make?” or “What category should this really sit in?” Instead, you ask: “How does this compare to the thing I already know?” That is vastly easier to manipulate.
Red Bull created a category. Non-alcoholic spirits hijack one.
There’s an important distinction between the two examples.
Red Bull genuinely created a new consumption logic. Energy drinks were not a mainstream category in Western markets at the time. The product needed its own visual and cultural language to survive. The slim 250ml can helped create that category.
Non-alcoholic craft gin does something subtler. It doesn’t create a new category. It parasitises an existing premium one. The cues are deliberate: heavy glass bottle, restrained colour palette, serif fonts, botanical illustrations, small-batch language such as “distilled”, “crafted”, “hand-finished”.
All of this tells your brain that this is a premium spirit. The £20 price then signals: still premium, just slightly less so. The buyer walks away satisfied and the brand walks away with spirit-level profit margins on cordial-level production.
Key takeaways
The power of modern marketing isn’t persuasion, it’s context control. If a company can decide what you compare their product to, they have already won most of the pricing battle. Red Bull avoided the soft-drink aisle in your head. Non-alcoholic gin walks straight into the spirits cabinet and quietly takes a seat.
The same mechanics apply almost perfectly in digital marketing; this is where a lot of businesses quietly burn money. Your website, ads and content don’t just sell what you do; they decide what prospective customers compare you to.
If your web design or SEO service is framed like a commodity, you force buyers to line you up against every other agency on price. But if you control the context – the problems you lead with, the outcomes you show, the language you use and even the structure of your pages – you change the reference point entirely.
In digital marketing, just like Red Bull’s can or a bottle of non-alcoholic gin, value isn’t created by what you offer. It’s created by what you make the buyer compare you to. At Mapped Out Media, we help businesses control that comparison. By positioning their websites, SEO and content around outcomes, our clients can stop competing on price and start competing on value.