The famous scientist Stephen Hawking recounted that when he was writing “A Brief History of Time” his editor warned him: “Don’t mention any mathematical formula. With each formula, sales are cut in half!” Hawking followed the advice and the book was one of the biggest sales phenomena in the history of scientific literature.
There are many other examples of how “allergy” to mathematics can cause harm. A friend told me about two very curious cases in the field of advertising in the United States.
In the 1980s, the A&W company launched a new hamburger to compete with the popular McDonald’s block. The block weighs 1/4 of a pound (about 110 grams), and the new sandwich’s campaign emphasized that, for the same price, it contained 1/3 of a pound of meat. It was a huge failure, because a lot of people thought that 1/3 is less than 1/4, since 3 is less than 4. Why pay the same for less meat?
A&W and its advertisers thought a lot and ended up finding a brilliant solution: they replaced the A&W 1/3 with the new A&W 3/9, which weighs 3/9 of a pound. We know that 3/9 is the same as 1/3, of course, but to many buyers it felt like a lot more since 3 and 9 are bigger numbers.
The A&W 3/9 was a success, to the point of selling out from time to time. Whenever this happened, the company replaced it with the A&W 2/6 (that’s right, 2/6 of a pound…) without charging anything extra for it!
The other case is even stranger. The Miller company launched Miller64 beer, which has only 64 calories, to compete with the leader in the segment of super light beers, Bud Light Next 80, which has 80 calories.
But market research showed that most potential customers thought 64 is more than 80, so the new beer would actually be heavier than the other one! How would you solve such an imbroglio, dear reader, dear reader?
Miller’s solution was both original and clever: they hired mathematician Ken Ono of the University of Virginia to clarify the issue. “I work in number theory, I specialize in partition congruences, modular shapes, and the Riemann Hypothesis. And I guarantee 64 is less than 80.”
“We proved, 64 is less than 80!” the commercial concludes enthusiastically.
