Third-pound burger

History

In the 1980s, A&W, led by owner A. Alfred Taubman, tried to take on McDonald’s popular Quarter Pounder with a bigger, better burger. They launched a campaign called “Third is the Word,” offering a third-pound patty for the same price as McDonald’s quarter-pound version. The idea was to give customers more meat for their money, but the promotion flopped. Taubman later wrote about the failure in his book Threshold Resistance.

Despite heavy TV and radio advertising, sales stayed low. Puzzled, he hired a market research firm to investigate. Focus groups revealed a surprising problem: many people thought one-third of a pound was smaller than one-fourth of a pound. They couldn’t understand why they should pay the same price for what seemed like less meat.

The confusion came from focusing on the numbers “3” and “4,” leading customers to believe that 1/3 was less than 1/4, even though the opposite is true. A 2014 New York Times article highlighted this as a classic example of consumer math mistakes. In blind taste tests, people actually liked A&W’s burger better than McDonald’s, and it cost less. Yet more than half of the focus group participants, according to a CBC report, said they avoided buying it because they thought they were getting a smaller portion.