Product Development Highlight: Assumptions & Their Inevitable Effects

In the 1980s, A&W released a hamburger called the “Third Pounder.” Savory and substantial, the burger postured itself as direct competition to the highly successful McDonald’s Quarter Pounder. A&W’s burger contained more meat, while the same price of the Quarter Pounder, offering customers more bite for their buck; beyond size, the Third Pounder outshined the Quarter Pounder in blind taste testing, with consumers preferring the flavor of the former. So, why did the Third Pounder flop?

Developers of the volume-oriented burger made vital decisions based on an unassuming assumption: their customers understood fractions. This was discovered after A&W conducted research centered on understanding the Third Pounder’s lack of success. Alfred Taubman, who owned A&W at the time, wrote about the confusion in his book Threshold Resistance, “More than half of the participants in the Yankelovich focus groups questioned the price of our burger. ‘Why,’ they asked, ‘should we pay the same amount for a third of a pound of meat as we do for a quarter-pound of meat at McDonald’s? You’re overcharging us.’ Honestly. People thought a third of a pound was less than a quarter of a pound. After all, three is less than four!” To the fast food goer, 1/3 seemed smaller than 1/4 — our third grade teachers are shaking their heads right now.

In their process of product development, A&W seems to have heavily focused on the goal of providing consumers a bigger hamburger, which may have indeed been valid, but without deeper research and immersion amidst the typical A&W customer, the problem space and the solution space unfortunately did not coalesce and a fatal assumption was overlooked.

RIP Third Pounder.