A lot of marketing strategies are pseudoscience. Just like a lot police investigation practices or body language assumptions.
The CEO decided that clients were smart intelligent people and treated people as adults. Aka, no discounts, no 99 pricing, it just costs what it costs, as low as we can make it, plus our margin.
JC Penny was already not too well, this helped sink them
This doesn’t meet the bar you want, but my marketing professor called the .99 idea the single greatest thing to come out of marketing in a century.
You should be able to find various tests and studies of this phenomenon on Google
I was watching a PBS documentary about the first humans in the Americas. All the scientists are super cool until you get to the American anthropologist who starts using phrenology to explain why Native American tribes shouldn’t be given repatriation rights, only for a Danish geneticist to say “yeah, this is absolutely a Native American and i am willing to testify to that in any court of law”
Pseudoscience is still all the rage if it can be used to push a political agenda.