I'm sorry but I don't think that people will be so easily and consistently fooled. Rather, it would be strange if no other brand tries to provide a more decent product. I'm with you on the fact that companies would prefer Two theory, and problably do try it out every so often. But if we're going to talk incentives here, there's good money to be made in designing a better cup and bragging about it consumers.

By the way, who would use that much toothpaste again if they tried it once? Maybe it just looks good to cover the tooth brush in ads.

I read a book once in which a character got a big promotion at the shampoo company for adding the word "repeat" to the instructions.

Every brand seems to have the same (or similar) cup. And I always thought I was using less than I needed, and I am still using too much! I have a front loading washer which uses less water and needs less detergent. So I always used a little less than 1. Turns out 1 is for medium loads. So there isn't even a mark for me! I should probably be using A LOT less than 1!

I first noticed this phenomenon with dog food. The dog food companies suggest you feed your dog about 6 times as much as a vet would.

My roommate took care of my cats when I was out of town for a month. When I got home they were enormous. Turns out he was giving them the amount of treats suggested on the back (6/day!).

A notable exception to this phenomenon is food - the "recommended serving" on the back of the box always strikes me as nowhere near enough. There are two advantages of this. First, people think they're getting more meals than they actually are. Second and more importantly, however, the small serving sizes come with low calorie counts, creating the illusion that the food is healthier than it is. Because how much people eat is controlled by how hungry they are/how delicious it is, rather than by the instructions on the box, there's no real downside to this tactic.

Actually Sam the obesity epidemic is, in fact, a downside.

I meant no economic downside for the manufacturers, obviously.

Theory 2 applies to a pretty limited range of products. For high-value or warranty-inclusive products, there's a pretty big incentive to make sure that the instructions are as clear and accurate as possible. As the value goes down, the benefit of having a product misused as a result of poor instructions increases right along with the consumer's likelihood of replacing it with a higher-value product from the same supplier (IKEA probably has a foolproof metric of this).

When I got contacts a few months ago they sat me down and showed me a video about how to clean and store your contacts as well as how to put them in and take them out. The video was produced by the distributor of the contact lens solution (Alcon), and in the video the model used a TON of solution.

Conscious of the fact that the stuff costs almost $9.00 a bottle, I asked the optometrist if I really needed to use that much, and he said no, that the video was ridiculous. He further recommended that I use a preservative-free saline solution for getting off particles and save the expensive solution for a quick rinse and store. It would cost me at least $40/month to use the contact solution the way it was in the video, but I can cut that down to $5/month by being careful.

Normally I expect this sort of thing from marketers, but it bothered me to see it in a medical setting. I am normally inclined to follow doctors orders obsessively and questioning doctors is a skill I am lucky to have. I was tempted to do it exactly like I saw in the video anyways just to be sure, but I don't have that kind of cash.

I agree with Andrew. Although I am no enemy of markets, clearly there is a need for vigilance towards marketing tricks like these. I would expect the problem to be most significant when there is little competition in a particular detail of products. Recommended dosages might just be such a detail.

Btw, I'm not in the States so this might not apply to you, but I always have to use MORE rice, pasta, couscous etc than recommended per person when cooking (and I'm no big eater).

Not only are they telling you to use way too much, but the stuff is mostly water anyway. I recently found a recipe on the internet to make laundry detergent, and decided I had to try it. The ingredients--borax, washing soda, and soap--cost less than one small bottle of detergent, and you use one bar of soap, a cup of one of the chemicals and half a cup of the other (I forget which way it was), and three gallons of water to make an enormous bucket of detergent. I'm still using the first batch, and have enough ingredients left that I can make four or five more, if I want to. The store-bought kind is slightly more concentrated, but not that much.

hmm, well on most toothpastes they have directions for using only a pea-sized amount. I think on the commercial they just want to show you what the toothpaste looks like to have brand recognition.

Y'all need to check out this blog: http://architectures.danlockton.co.uk/2007/02/07/packet-switching/

That link goes to a specific article about portion sizing (it's a big article), and there are many other examples found of "design with intent," and the intent is making you consume more product. Here's a snippet:

Packet switching
By Dan Lockton ⋅ February 7, 2007

Both Dr Tom Stafford (co-author of the fantastic Mind Hacks book & blog) and Gregor Hochmuth (creator of FlickrStorm, an improved Flickr search system) have been in touch suggesting packaging/portion sizes as a significant everyday architecture of control, (or at least an aspect of design which has a major impact on consumers’ behaviour, and can be used to change it), and pointing to articles on the work of Professor Brian Wansink, of Cornell University’s Food & Brand Lab.

That blog is full of fascinating research that will consume supersize portions of your time before you know it. Highly recommended.

I'd be interested to see how many people have double- or triple- sized washers and would actually be doing a "large" load on a regular basis. I'd also be interested to hear some alternatives for improvements, given that there has to be some excess to prevent spillage, as someone said above. Maybe a clear cap with obviously-labeled "large", "medium", and "small" lines?

One thing I've noticed that I find obnoxious is that practically all lotions now come in pump bottles. That way, when the bottle is "empty" there is still an inch at the bottom, unused. Heck, even ketchup comes in a squeeze bottle (not that I suggest using ketchup as hand lotion).

Allergan would like for me to believe that I must use a separate disposable brush for each eye when applying it to my eyelashes.

They also recently increased the cost of a 3ml bottle of Latisse to $150. So there's that...

The makers of Alka Seltzer were looking to find a way to sell more of their product, so they came up with the catchy, "Plop plop fizz fizz" jingle to imply you should be using two of their pills, when researched showed taking two pills didn't provide any more relief than taking one. They effectively doubled their sales by singing at us. And knowing this, I still take use two pills.

I haven't noticed the different ordering of gas; it's always cheap on the left. But I do buy the expensive gas now because it is ethanol-free. Big difference in gas mileage. Enough that it's more economical on a per mile basis to buy the expensive gas.

Speaking of cars, I just recently found out that it's no longer recommended to change the oil every 3000 miles/ 5000 km.Maybe it's just me and everyone else got the memo back in 2010. Or maybe the auto industry wants you to keep servicing your car frequently and hasn't been too keen on getting this info out to the public.

Well, maybe I just eat too much, but I find the reverse happens with food. 6 servings in this tiny packet of chips or cereal? Yeah right. I've always thought it's so that, in the store, it looks like better value than it really is. (It seems to happen worst of all with gluten free pasta, which makes sense. That stuff is so expensive per serving - it would look even more expensive if they were honest about serving size!)

With laundry detergent they also like to boast that it does x amount of loads (sometimes even "now 3 extra loads - 33 total" etc). So I guess by technically telling you a reasonable amount so they can say it has lots of loads, but then hoping you'll use more and not actually get that many loads out of it, they win both ways.

Yes there is greed and deception. There's also a kind of performance anxiety: the need to assume the worst case--e.g., the clothes from the kids' backyard party rather than the adult's casual friday office outfit; or the head-to-head torture test by a reviewing organization.

Clothes is one thing, but this overconsumption approach is also apparent in, for example, shampoo, where using too much of it can do damage.

I've also noticed that, at my grocery store, certain items are actually less economical in larger packages than in the smaller, contrary to expectations, logic and common sense.

I use a coin operated laundry that has clear glass windows on the front of the washers. If you run an "empty load" without adding any laundry detergent at all, you will almost always see enough suds to fill the entire window. Which I think means that even after the 2 rinse cycles, there's probably enough leftover detergent to do another full load of laundry, because people are so overestimating the amount of detergent they need. With the HE washers and the ultra concentrated detergents I bet you only need a couple of tablespoons.