Arrange Discounts in Tiered Amounts

Suppose that customers get $50 off when they spend $200.

In this scenario, customers need to spend $200 — which might be tough to imagine. In order to make this discount more realistic (and thus enticing), businesses need to strengthen the mental imagery of spending $200.

How? They can offer tiered discounts.

• $50 off $200
• $25 off $150
• $10 off $50
• $5 off $20

Customers might struggle to imagine the $200 threshold, but the lowest tier — $20 — is easy to imagine.

And now it gets sneaky: Once they imagine spending $20, it becomes easier to imagine the next threshold of $50.

Then it becomes easy to imagine $150. Then $200.

Lower tiers provide a sequence of images that transform a high threshold into a feasible reality.

Deep Dive: Pick up my book Imagine Reading This Book to learn the detailed mechanism behind this “simulation fluency.”