No B.S. Price Strategy

Why isn’t the impact of commoditization universal? Why doesn’t discounting force everyone in the category to discount? How can there be a price war with conscientious objectors who prosper? The answer is a big glaring secret

hidden in plain sight: some people are willing to knowingly pay more.

The profitable question for you is: why?

Those are your people. Align with them. Give them the things they can’t get with the free option. Make no mistake those things do exist. You have to find them and let it be known that you provide them. Once you do that you can attract plenty of buyers who will happily pay a premium for the privilege of doing business with you

The best price strategy of all is creating visibly excess demand—in our case, a very busy, thriving practice, often with a waiting list.

The more demand you create the more scarce your offering will become in relation to demand and the higher your prices can go as a result.

The million dollar secret here, summarized, is that every “free” has concealed costs, and when those costs are revealed to a market, there are many customers unwilling to incur the costs of free and profoundly prefer paying for the goods or services they want.

Let me summarize the million dollar secret again. Every “free” has concealed costs, and when those costs are revealed to a market, there are many customers who are unwilling to incur the costs of free and who profoundly prefer paying for the goods or services they want.

And just about everybody has the needed component parts to replicate this: some slow times or unused capacity that expires if not used, the ability to create a really extraordinary and compelling Free without undermining its other price strategy, and the ability to force registration for the Free through an online data capture place, to create a valuable asset of a well-organized prospect and customer list with a lot of information useful in follow-up and on-going marketing.

This is the game played out at airports often, when flights are over-booked. Free roundtrip tickets are offered to anybody who will stay put and wait hours to get on a later flight. If there are 300 on the flight, you never see a stampede of 300 fighting over the free tickets. Sometimes only 2 or 3. Often the airline’s announcer has to sweeten the offer, after no takers go to the podium. If it was impossible to combat free, and everybody wanted it, there’d be a mad rush. Why isn’t there? Because the majority prefer the cash price they’ve paid to get where they want to go when they planned on getting there than a free trip now plus another free trip later, with its costs including not getting where they wanted to go when they wanted to get there, waiting around the airport for five boring hours, and uncertainty about really getting out on the next flight. For 295 of 300, the price of free is too high.