This Is Marketing: You Cant Be Seen Until You Learn to See

Different prices (different people)
The Quakers invented the price tag. Before that, it was generally accepted
that nothing had a firm price. Everyone haggled.
But Macy’s and Wanamaker’s needed to get big, to build huge stores
with low-paid staff. There was no way to train and trust that many people to
haggle. And so they pioneered the Quaker idea at scale.
While the price tag was originally conceived because Quakers thought it
was immoral to charge different prices to different people, it caught on

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because industrialists and big organizations liked the efficiency.
But, like everything else, the internet changes things.
On one hand, you can tell the story that the price is the price. Tesla told
this story to luxury car buyers and they breathed a sigh of relief. But when
Uber tried to match pricing to demand, it cost their brand billions in trust.
For most organizations, particularly small ones, the hard part isn’t the
mechanics of charging different amounts.
It’s the storytelling.
I bring this up because it’s a powerful way to understand the story of
your price (and the price of your story). How do you feel when you find out
that you got a discount that no one else got? What if you deserved it? How
do you feel if other people got that discount and you didn’t?
What about the scarcity and pricing built into Kickstarter? Does the fear
of missing out on a level that’s almost full push you to act?
“Cheap” is another way to say “scared”
Unless you’ve found an extraordinary new way to deliver your service or
product, racing to be the cheapest probably means that you’re not investing
sufficiently in change.
When you’re the cheapest, you’re not promising change. You’re
promising the same, but cheaper.
The race to the bottom is tempting, because nothing is easier to sell than
cheaper. It requires no new calculations or deep thinking on the part of your
customer. It’s not cultural or emotional. It’s simply cheaper.
Low price is the last refuge of a marketer who has run out of generous
ideas.