Priced to Influence, Sell & Satisfy: Lessons from Behavioral Economics for Pricing Success

Book excerpt: Pricing holds the key to business success. The greatest challenge in pricing is the human factor. To price effectively, customer psychology usually trumps rational microeconomic thinking. * How did Subway turn one accidentally discovered price promotion into a multi-billion dollar success story? * How much knowledge of prices do customers really have? * Why do most people spend two months’ salary to buy an engagement ring? * Does Pay What You Want pricing really work? * How can you get your customers to trade up? * Why do Supreme t-shirts sell for $1,500 or more? * Why do so many consumers hate Uber’s surge pricing even though economists love it? In Priced to Influence, Sell & Satisfy, you will find answers to these and many more questions. The book introduces the latest thinking about Psychological Pricing, the science of designing effective pricing strategies using behavioral economics principles. You will learn how customers search for, evaluate, share, and use prices in their buying decisions, how they participate in setting prices, and what managers can do to understand and influence these processes. Psychological pricing actions are levered. Many of them require relatively small investments and produce disproportionately large returns to the business.