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THE NO-BRAINER OFFER: WHY PEOPLE NEED TO FEEL LIKE THEY’VE ROBBED YOU
The hidden psychology behind why the best offers make customers feel like they’ve won...
Niall Ratcliffe
October 19, 2025
In partnership with
Morning!
I’m back on a northern train to Burnley, this time for work. One of our clients makes fan wear for a ton of the Premier League teams, and we’re off to Turf Moor to film some content for them.
So, once again, I’m writing this newsletter in my notes app, shoulder to shoulder with the person next to me, eating yet another Tesco meal deal.
Anyway, the longer I’ve been in marketing, the more I realise that everything comes down to offers. One no-brainer offer can completely change your business.
It was a no-brainer offer that skyrocketed Dropbox to $10 billion in revenue. That made Boots a household brand and kept companies like Domino’s alive.
Over the next 1000 words, I’m gonna try and show you what a true no-brainer offer looks like and how you can create your own.
Let’s get into it!
THE ESSAY
Back in the 90s, the popular UK store Boots was most well known as a pharmacy and wellbeing store.
You went there when you were ill, unhealthy, or needed medicine.
For decades, it was a thriving business. But as the late 90s came around, supermarkets were becoming a threat to their existence.
Tesco started rolling out stores across the country, Spar was expanding and adding more stores, Sainsbury’s and the Co-op were trialling more healthcare products. If Boots were to survive, they needed to give people more reasons to come and shop in Boots.
So, they came up with a plan to drag in more “lunchtime traffic” with grab-and-go food. If they could get people to nip into Boots for lunch, maybe they’d buy their other products too.
But that was not going to be an easy feat. City workers had 100s of options to choose from. Options that they’ve been going to for lunch for years. If Boots was going to steal some of that lunchtime traffic, they’d need a true no-brainer offer.
So, they came up with this idea of a “Meal deal”
You get:
A main (a sandwich or salad)
A snack (crisps, fruit pot, bar)
A drink (soft drink, water, or juice)
All for £2.50 (saving people £1.50 on average - nearly 40% off)
As you can imagine, people flocked to Boots to start getting a meal deal at lunchtime.
It was a true no-brainer offer, and it completely changed the Boots brand.
They went from being on the back foot and staring down getting bullied off the high street. To a thriving high street store worth £10 billion 30 years later.
But what does a no-brainer offer actually mean?
There’s a big difference between a no-brainer offer and a good offer.
A good offer is an offer that encourages you to buy. But a no-brainer offer is one where you come away feeling like you’ve robbed the bank.
Take the meal deal example...
When Boots introduced it, people were going to other stores and buying a sandwich, a drink, and a snack all separately.
For easy maths, let’s say the sandwich costs £2, the drink £1, and the snack £1. Lunch = £4.
Boots had the same marked prices for each item. But when you went for a meal deal, you literally got nearly 50% for free.
You walk out feeling like you’ve beaten the house. Like you’ve robbed the bank. Like you’ve won.
That’s a no-brainer offer.
A similar thing happened with Dropbox back in 2009.
In 2008, Dropbox launched its flashy new cloud storage product with a simple and good offer…
Free plan: 2GB of storage
$9.99/mo plan: 50GB (or $99/yr if paid yearly)
It was a good offer, and it’s what got them off the ground.
Yet the reality was, they were getting outcompeted by the 2 massive players in the space - Microsoft SkyDrive (now OneDrive) and Box.net.
Microsoft had a massive built-in user base and Box.net had amassed ~5M users already. If Dropbox were going to compete… scratch that… if Dropbox were going to survive, they needed something more. They needed a no-brainer offer.
So in early 2009, Dropbox launched a new offer.
Free plan: 2GB of storage
But if you referred a friend, you both got an extra 500 MB of storage (up to 18 GB).
Not only was it an incredible marketing tactic with a clever growth loop, it was a no-brainer offer. Now, you could get 18GB of storage for free - all you had to do was refer friends.
And that’s exactly what everyone did.
It’s estimated that switching to the referral offer took Dropbox’s user base from around 100,000 users to 4 million by January 2010, with 35% of all signups coming through the referral program.
Then, after the referral-driven surge, Dropbox raised $250M (Series B) at a ~$4B valuation in Sept 2011.
That’s the impact of a no-brainer offer.
So, how do we create a no-brainer offer for ourselves?
There are 1000s of different ways to create a no-brainer offer, but from all of the research I’ve done… The best have these 3 things:
1. A Clear & Simple Exchange
Look at all of the examples above. None of them have a complex money-back guarantee or hoops people need to jump through.
It’s always: You give X → You get Y
You give £2.50 → You get a sandwich, drink, and a snack
You refer a friend → You get 500 MB of free storage
People go wrong with offers when they start to make them more complex. When you make it more complex, you inherently make it worse.
2. They Operate At Break-Even (Or a loss)
The best offers make the customer feel like they’re robbing you. Sometimes, to give them that feeling you literally have to let them rob you.
Costco’s no-brainer offer is that you get a hot dog and a 20 oz drink (with free refills) for $1.50.
It feels like you’re robbing them, and that’s because you are. It’s a loss leader. The customer comes for the no-brainer offer and then buys other things.
Sky are masters at this.
I recently called them up to get a quote for wifi in my new apartment. Before them, I’d called: BT, Plusnet, Virgin, and Talk Talk.
Everyone had quoted £35/mo or above.
I then called Sky. They offered me the same wifi package for £22/mo IF I bought Sky TV with it - £15/mo - that came with free Netflix, Discovery +, and more.
It was an absolutely no-brainer, I went with Sky.
Chances are Sky will make no money undercutting the market by 33% on wifi. But by making me feel like I was robbing them, I now have Sky TV in the house. They’ll then hope I go and buy Sky Cinema or Sky Sports.
That’s where they’ll make their money.
This sounds like cheating, but the reality is, the more the customer feels like they’re robbing you, the better your offer is. And sometimes that means selling a breakeven or a loss.
3. They’re Stacked
“Stacking” an offer is arguably the easiest way to make it a no-brainer offer. It’s simply where you bundle multiple offers together so the perceived value increases.
For example, Boots could have launched 3 offers:
40% off sandwiches
40% off drinks
40% off snacks
But their AOV would have jumped off a cliff and people would’ve still been doing the maths on how much each item cost - leading them to compete on price.
Instead, they bundle the offer together into a meal deal, which seems much more appealing.
A better example is how Alex Hormozi launches his books.
Rather than saying, “Buy this book in the first 5 days for X off”.
He says, “Buy my book in the first 5 days and receive:
The full video course of the contents (£2,500 value)
A free PDF eBook (Worth £18)
The Paid Ads Playbook (24 pages, (£1,250 value)
12 Proven Email Templates (£650 value)
Access to our private Slack community for 30 days"
(You’ll notice that Sky also did this by throwing in Netflix and Discovery+ + into their offer)
By stacking things into the offer, buying the book becomes exceptionally more valuable.
I could add here that most great offers have scarcity & urgency baked in, or that you need a guarantee or risk reversal. But truly, I feel like when I start getting so tactical like that I’ll just end up spouting the stuff that Hormozi explains in his book ‘$100M Offers’ - so you’d be better off just reading it for that kinda stuff.
Instead, I wanted to give you a top-level overview of some of the best offers of the modern era and some inspiration with the key things those offers had in them.
Like I said at the beginning, companies live and die by their offers. The better your offer, the better the company.
Interesting, to this day, Boots’ meal deal is one of their most successful offers the stores run. A recent study they did with Storeboost saw that when they added a meal deal to a Boots store in Manchester airport, footfall jumped by +12% within 2 hours and sales jumped +30% on the day.
A true no-brainer offer that stood the test of time. Hopefully, this essay helped you improve yours :)
That’s all I’ve got for you today!
Until next Sunday.
— Niall
P.S. Take a second to rate this week’s essay below. It’s massively helpful :)
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