Marketing 101: What are decoy marketing and price anchoring?
Marketing has a language all its own. This is our latest in a series of posts aimed at helping new marketers learn that language. What term do you find yourself explaining most often to new hires during onboarding? Let us know.
The entire global marketplace is built on transactions. And those transactions occur because a buyer perceives that the value of a product or service justifies the cost (and a major part of that cost is monetary price).
I bring this up because many business and marketing folks think they set the price of their products. Well, they don’t. In a capitalist system, only the market sets the price for your product.
Of course, business and marketing professionals have an essential role in this process …
Marketers present the price, they don’t set the price
This is an important distinction because it’s not only the monetary amount of the price that affects how well it will be perceived and thus how likely it is to be accepted.
It’s how that price is presented.
Which brings us to some common price and value presentation tactics.
Price anchoring
When I learned Economics 101 in high school, one of the first things I learned was that the supply and demand set the price in the market. You can even plot it out with simple curves. When the demand shifts up — boom — the price goes up.
Demand curve shift via Silverstar
It all seems so logical. Just crunch the numbers.
But it’s not. Because supply and demand don’t only set price, price itself can influence demand. And price influences demand because humans don’t run a logical calculation for every transaction they face every day. That is far too complex. We’ve got other things to do.
So we look for shortcuts. We look for signals. And one of them is this: What should the price of this product be?
Here’s where price anchoring comes in. Let’s say you see a box of cereal in a store. It costs $3. Is that a lot or a little? A good price or a bad price?
Wait, there’s some more information. Actually, the regular price of that cereal is $4. And it is on sale for $3. In fact, if you buy this cereal today, you’re saving a whole dollar compared to what it normally costs.
