I witnessed an interesting disagreement a few weeks ago between my architect colleagues:
Round figures or specific figures for our fees?
Everyone agreed that roundness or specificity weren’t actually important. Fee development for professional services tends towards ballpark numbers. Even when someone develops a fee based on projected hours, someone in the room is likely to suggest lower or higher. The path to a final fee seemed to look like: get most of the way there with reason, and then finish up with your gut.
At the end of the day, does that fee feel right?
Heads were nodded at this observation.
But what the room of architects could not agree on was whether a round fee or a specific fee looked better to the client.
Would $32,000 or $31,279 make them more likely to sign?
My only offering was the observation that Buzzfeed relies on specific numbers for its listicle articles.
My interpretation of this tendency, dating from my content marketing days at Oxford Dictionaries, was that the specificity led to a sense of credibility.
When a reader sees a Buzzfeed article touting “27 Harry Potter Memes You Need to Check Out,” doesn’t the specificity of 27 make you feel as though Buzzfeed has scoured the Internet and found every essential Harry Potter meme?
The moment we closed the meeting, though, I had some doubts. Both about the uncertainty of specific vs. round fees between my colleagues—more on that later—but also about my claims that specific numbers generate a sense of credibility.
I started by looking up some background on the numbers in Buzzfeed listicles. I located a Medium post by a former Buzzfeed data scientist, which drew on some internal research on listicle numbers. However, the post focused not on the question of round vs. specific numbers, bur rather on odd vs. even numbers.
It turns out that, as a group, odd-numbered listicles outperform even-numbered ones.
It’s not entirely clear why, though some have suggested that the rule of odds may have some effect. The rule of odds, which states that an odd number is more interesting than an even number, is understood as a visual phenomenon. But did the rule of odds have any bearing on actual numbers?
Some Googling later, I can verify: there are merits to both approaches that are rooted in real psychology. (My hunch about specificity-as-credibility turns out to still just be a hypothesis.)
- Specific fees are more likely to persuade clients. This one confused me at first, because it has nothing to do with trust or accuracy. It has to do with the fact that specific numbers ($365,478) feel smaller than similar round numbers ($365,000). Specific numbers remind us of small numbers, so the overall effect triggers us to think of them as smaller. (Even when they’re larger!) I know—this is extremely weird.
- Round fees are occasionally likely to persuade clients. There’s some research that suggests round prices trigger an ‘easy’ sensation. However, this research was based on traditional consumer products, not professional services that cost thousands of dollars, so unless fees are small, it’s probably better to be specific.
Taylor Coe 