Understanding How Your Brain Thinks About What You’re Really Buying

Pricing is the trickiest component of the marketing mix.  It’s easy to get caught up in "Price" being solely a dollar figure, but it’s so much more than that.

If you think of Price as simply the amount of our money that we are willing to trade for a benefit – a whole new world of possibilities and profit will open up for you.

Because so much of my work involves understanding what’s important to customers when they are buying what my clients are selling, I spend a lot of time "Debriefing" my brain on how I’ve been perceiving value as I make a variety of purchases.

My primary focus has been, what triggers us to part with seemingly large amounts of cash.  Why do we NOT choose to purchase something yesterday because we thought it was too expensive, and what changed to make us write that check today.

I’m starting to come up with some theories on this.  We don’t pay for items, we don’t even pay for solutions, we pay for more visceral benefits than that.  Here is the start of my list.

• Paying to Get it Done.  Time is our most valuable commodity.  If you’re not good at something, if you don’t like to do something and if you’d rather be doing something else – then regardless of what you’re buying, you’re paying to get it done — so you don’t have to.  I recently had an experience where I felt more joy in writing a check to get something done, than in experiencing the service or the product.  Go figure.
• Paying for Expertise.  I love computers and the web and I CAN start a blog, a web site, shopping carts and the rest.  But I can’t do it quickly, I can’t do it correctly the first time and I can’t guarantee that I haven’t missed something critical.  So I pay for the expert to do it.  In this case, I experience sheer more joy after the check is written as I experience the joy of seeing something work well.
• Paying to Follow.  I work with clients to grow their business, but I can’t operate on myself.  Like a lot of other people, I will pay to be told what to do because someone who has done it, knows the way, the truth and can see the light and will help me get there faster.  This would be like paying a personal trainer to help you achieve a physical goal.  The benefit is knowing that you don’t have to swim in the unknown sea of "I hope this works."

What’s been your experience, what’s on your list?