71–79 of 79 posts
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All the mind manipulation traps presented in the article are deceptive and fraudulent. They all should be made illegal if they are not already.
I wont agree to it. I would call them hacks, are hacks fraudulent?
I pity the sociopathic state of your mind.
Having a price crossed out to give the impression of a sale is just straight up lying. It's illegal here in Norway at least. The product must have been sold a certain number of times for the crossed out price in order for it to be legally presented as a "before" price. https://www.forbrukertilsynet.no/lov-og-rett/veiledninger-og...
All the mind manipulation traps presented in the article are deceptive and fraudulent. They all should be made illegal if they are not already.
Tell people they must list the plans from cheapest to most expensive, left to right or top to bottom? Well and good; compliance is easy.
Disallow such indication of “specials”? Yeah, that can be done, though marketers will grumble a lot at you.
But the decoy? There’s no sane way of banning that in general, though you could ban some forms of it.
The paradox of choice? Yeah, you could ban this (and doing so would be consistent with opt-in doctrine which is widely used in things like spam legislation), but marketers would definitely growl at you and test the boundaries.
Downthread someone’s mentioned “$9.99” as a form of anchoring. I wish that was banned, e.g. you can’t price within 1% below some notion of “round number”, so that $14,999 would have to go up to $15,000 or down to $14,850.
This is all about tricking people, and nothing about designing pricing to match the value provided. Pricing, especially for software products, is one of the biggest levers for increasing revenue through new and even current customers. It’s very important to get it right, and to experiment occasionally. (I know because I’ve done it for companies.) It involves a lot more than growth-hacking the pricing page.
Why would you design a price for "value provided"? That's highly subjective to the user. Users also generally only pay for what they expect to pay, not the value they're getting. For instance, some utility might save hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars over the course of its usage, which is tremendous value . Yet if the average user expects that it should cost no more than, say, twenty dollars, that's what the…
If something saves me thousands of hours, I am not likely to both miss that fact and stay in business to be a customer for long.
Sellers have a harder problem figuring out what consumers value. The solutions to that are things like collecting useage data, eating your own dogfood or BYOC (be your own customer), outright feature requests, competitor's decisions ( which are market-proven value assignments) etc.
Also 0.xxx versions serve this purpose- it's partially a pre-market exploration of the value of features before a pricing / version segregation attempt is made .
There's just no way consumers doesn't know what they value when they use it or its not there.
There is a class of things which consumers dont' know they value because they've never had it to value in the first place (Pinterest, Instagram) but that's a different thing than assigning different values to different aggregates of established features.
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> some utility might save hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars over the course of its usage Yes, "might": > you can't know the value users will actually get out of your product So the problem you have is that you think (but don't know) that your product is much more valuable to your users than they think it is (since they're only willing to pay $20 for it). You're not going to fix that problem by hacking how yo…
> So the problem you have is that you think (but don't know) that your product is much more valuable to your users than they think it is (since they're only willing to pay $20 for it). No, the problem is that whatever you think your product is worth is irrelevant. What matters is your costs, that puts the bottom on the price, unless you want to burn cash for growth. Your customers expectations are the ceiling. Of cou…
Ok, so in the situation you describe, what are your costs? If that's so important, why haven't you told us what it is?
> Your customers expectations are the ceiling.
Your customers' expectations are based on what they think the value of the product is to them, which is based on what they think the product can do for them. If your product is worth $1000 to a significant number of customers, it must be able to do valuable things for customers that products selling for $20 a unit just can't do. Tell your customers what those things are, and their expectations will change.
What is true is that the number of customers that can get $1000 of value from your product will be significantly less than the number that can get $20 of value from it. But it makes a big difference whether the first number is zero (or close enough to it to make no difference) or a significant fraction of the second number. Your hypothetical was that it's the latter.
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> An organization with rock solid ethics can use these techniques to hack their users brains to get them to more accurately do what is in the purchaser’s best interest. While I agree that people are far from perfectly rational, I strongly disagree with the viewpoint you are taking here. You do not know what is in the purchaser's best interest. Only they do. Remember that the maxim that humans are far from perfectly r…
I am not sure that I should continue this thread since human psychology is basically an infinitely deep rabbit hole, but...: 1. In many/most cases, there are a very limited set of user profiles that can be used to model purchaser behavior. A well-designed pricing scheme will accommodate these purchasers needs and wants. In some cases, a good pricing scheme will push the purchaser to be more analytic in matching their…
I find it very informative about how you determine what pricing scheme is in your best interest. I see nothing whatever that justifies your earlier claim that you somehow know what is in the purchaser's best interest.
To be clear: I have no problem whatever with a seller who tells me up front that he is out to get the best deal for himself that he can and that's all he cares about. If I choose to buy from such a seller, I know what I'm getting into and I might still choose to buy if I am getting a reasonable deal for myself. There is often plenty of room for a win-win between two parties who both are seeking to maximize their own self-interest and don't make any pretense about knowing what's best for the other party. That is basically what you are describing in most of your post.
What I have a problem with is statements like this:
> I assumed that all they needed was accurate information in order to make the "correct" choice. I cannot begin to tell you how wrong I was.
The problem I have is that this statement contradicts what you yourself describe in the rest of your post. When you say that there are situations where the customer is price indifferent, you are not saying that they are irrational. You are saying that, given their particular situation, they are rationally being price indifferent--because the price literally does not matter to them as much as other factors. (For example, customers who are willing to pay $150 or $180 for a bottle of wine instead of $120 are not being irrational in paying more--the difference in price is literally negligible to them in comparison with, for example, not having to take a lot of time to find a good bottle of wine.)
In other words, I think you would be more honest to just admit that you are getting the best deal for yourself as a seller that you can, and that you expect your customers to get the best deal for themselves that they can, rather than claiming that you somehow know better than they do what is in their best interest.
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> maybe adding the 500 option is the way to communicate your features most effectively. Not if nobody actually buys it, which was a premise of that particular example.
Especially then. It allows you to proportionally weight the price against what's available. All of this is just effective communication. In fact, considering that all we have available is the end result of the operation, I think the "effective communication" hypothesis is much stronger supported than the "tricking" hypothesis.
We have the result that more people bought the 220 option when the 500 option was offered.[
We do not know that still more people wouldn't have bought the 220 option if its features had been effectively communicated. If the 220 option really is a better deal for many customers, telling them so directly would seem to be a better strategy than hinting it to them by providing a 500 option that nobody actually buys. But this strategy was not even tried.
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Especially then. It allows you to proportionally weight the price against what's available. All of this is just effective communication. In fact, considering that all we have available is the end result of the operation, I think the "effective communication" hypothesis is much stronger supported than the "tricking" hypothesis.
> all we have available is the end result of the operation We have the result that more people bought the 220 option when the 500 option was offered.[ We do not know that still more people wouldn't have bought the 220 option if its features had been effectively communicated. If the 220 option really is a better deal for many customers, telling them so directly would seem to be a better strategy than hinting it to the…
> Yes, Product C is slightly cheaper than the most expensive option, but it offers less storage than any of the options. Why would a business want wrong looking pricing on their pricing page, "decoy"s aside? Seems that would deter people more. Makes the business seem like it doesn't have its stuff together. Would you trust a company that seems like it can't do simple math? I think the author may be getting at somethi…
Usually what is done is that you choose a minimum price lets say an ISP offers 25mbit for $20, 50mbit for $35 and 100mbit for $50. The 25mbit plan is obviously poor value but at the same time it is still the cheapest option. Some customers truly don't need more than 25mbit but if you are looking to spend more than $20 then you are more likely to go straight for 100mbit than for 50mbit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> all we have available is the end result of the operation We have the result that more people bought the 220 option when the 500 option was offered.[ We do not know that still more people wouldn't have bought the 220 option if its features had been effectively communicated. If the 220 option really is a better deal for many customers, telling them so directly would seem to be a better strategy than hinting it to the…
It certainly was. The features were showcased through comparison and analogy: a common technique to simplify understanding. This technique is frequently used in news (fifteen football fields), in technology (it would take a desktop 1000 years to calculate this), and really anywhere. It’s a damned good technique because it eases understanding.
I don't see anywhere in the article where it tells how they tried telling customers the advantages of the 220 option and how it would be a better value for them.