Your price is NOT your pricing!!

The truth is that your price is only one element of your pricing.

To illustrate what I mean, here’s an example:

You’re looking for something ‘specific’ while shopping. Let’s use a pair of shoes as an example.

You walk into a shop where you saw shoes you liked in the window. On the window it states: Bargain basement prices in bold letters.

You basically have to wade your way through the aisles to the shoes at the back of the shop. 

You spot the shoes on display, but there’s no one there to help you find your size. 

You finally have the shoes in your hand and you look at the price.

Or my absolute pet hate . . . You have to ask someone for the price because it’s nowhere to be found.

Scenario 1: Chances are you think, they’re nice but . . . . 

Scenario 2: You pick up the shoes, head to the cashier, to find out they only take cash and you don’t carry cash.

Scenario 3: You see a notice up saying NO Refunds under any circumstances, and you’re not sure these shoes are the exact match in colour to the dress you’re buying them to wear with.

In all 3 these scenarios, the sale is lost!! 

Now this is not true for all shoppers, some will congratulate themselves on the ‘bargain’ they got. 

But I’m not sure you want your business to be geared towards bargain shoppers. I have a sneaky suspicion it’s not. 

I’m going to touch on only one element of pricing that you need to get crystal clear on. 

Perception is Everything

The truth is that the entire experience a potential customer has with your brand has to match the price you’re charging. 

This experience starts from the moment they ‘discover’ you.

Your customer is forming a perception based NOT on logic but rather on emotion, intuition and feeling.

In the shoe example I used, the emotion that’s being stirred is one of irritation. The client is made to feel like they are an irritation in the way the store was laid out, in the way they had to look for their own size, in the way there was only one payment method.

Their intuition or ‘gut’ is screaming, yes screaming, at them that the quality of the shoes are not great. Again, because how can the quality of the shoes be any good if no quality is shown in the store around layout, customer service, payment methods.

For me I would be feeling quite ‘cheap’ in a store like that. Almost as though I’m waiting for someone to say: Ooh, I know where you got those shoes. I would never buy from there. 

So you have to ask yourself, what emotion, intuition and feeling is my brand stirring in my potential customer?

The perception you want to create has to be carried across each and every customer touchpoint within your brand.

I want to focus on just one touchpoint that I see so many women struggle with - themselves! 

I cannot tell you the number of times that I have met someone who has created one perception with their brand, but when I meet them either virtually or in person, that perception is blown out of the water. 

Here’s an example: They have a brand, based around them, that gives me the perception that they are uber wealthy. I book a call with them to chat around potentially becoming a client and they meet me in what is clearly a corner of their bedroom and I can see the washing basket behind them. My entire perception of them and their brand is undone in an instant and I most probably won’t become a client. 

Now there is absolutely nothing at all wrong with working out of a corner of your bedroom, hell I did that for most of 2020 as my daughter was inhabiting my office, but at no point did I create a perception with my brand that I wasn’t. 

In actual fact I used that to build connection to my potential clients by  sharing that I was working from my bedroom because of how the pandemic had impacted us as a family.

Bottom line: You have to decide the perception that you want to create with your clients and you have to live it as the business owner!

I want to touch on something else around perception.

Perception extends to the people/brands you collaborate with or people/brands who become your affiliates.

You need to ensure that the perception created by your collaboration partner is aligned to the perception you create or want to create.

If you don’t do this, you can either dilute or at worst destroy the perception you’ve worked so hard to create.

I’ve seem this happen again and again in competition collaborations, where I’m left thinking: Why on earth would this person be collaborating with this other person, it doesn’t make sense at all. 

So how do you know if your collaboration has had an impact on the perception of you and your brand.

Three ways:

Clients of the collaboration become difficult. 

You will see an increase in refund requests.

When they’re ‘finished’ whatever it is that they bought, they’re reluctant to give you a testimonial.

This is because the client themselves might not even realise what is happening, they just feel ‘icky’ and ‘icky’ leads to irritation which leads to . . . . you fill in the blanks.

Pricing for Profit 

This blog was just a taster of some of the elements I cover in my Pricing for Profit Programme.

The programme takes you beyond your price, to the strategy, tactics and magic that make people buy/buy/buy!

Because as I said, there is far more to pricing than just your price.