A única forma de todos termos um lugar neste mundo.

Ontem, ao telefone, o Aranha chamou-me a atenção para este artigo do mês de Maio da Harvard Business Review "How to Stop Customers from Fixating on Price" de Marco Bertini e Luc Wathieu.

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O artigo chama a atenção para o uso do preço como uma ferramenta para combater a fixação dos clientes no preço.

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Primeiro uma introdução com a mesma mensagem de Youngme Moon:

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"Managers ... can name the distinctive features and explain their value—and they can tell you how much they’ve spent on innovation to keep that edge.

The problem is, their customers don’t seem to have gotten the memo. Faced with the many options available to them on store shelves, they behave as though only one factor matters in the buying decision: price. They treat the company’s products as commodities."

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"The constant undercutting to capture customers sometimes spurs efficiency gains, but more often it damages brand equity and erodes profit margins. To make matters worse, customers in these markets develop low expectations and grow disengaged: They fixate on price and lose interest in marketing communications and all but the most radical innovations.

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It is still possible, however, to jolt customers into considering the value of your offering in terms of quality and personal relevance. To persuade them that they have a meaningful decision to make, you can—paradoxically—use the last thing you want to be decisive: the price."

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Em seguida, os autores descrevem 4 estratégias possíveis:

1. Use Price Structure to Clarify Your Advantage ("to use pricing to diminish price sensitivity is to make it call attention to the value your product or service delivers, and ideally to the one dimension that most meaningfully differentiates it from those of competitors.")
2. Willfully Overprice to Stimulate Curiosity ("If you think like the customers in recent studies we conducted, you don’t automatically dismiss the higher-priced model. Rather, you’re motivated to take a closer look: Perhaps added features justify that price—features you haven’t considered but might in fact care about. Thus the manufacturer has produced exactly the response it needs to compete in an intensely price-conscious market.")
3. Partition Prices to Highlight Overlooked Benefits
4. Equalize Price Points to Crystallize Personal Relevance

"Some companies prefer to keep customers focused on price because they have a basic cost advantage to leverage. Most companies, however, would benefit from getting people to think harder about value. They need customers to appreciate the innovations they introduce, but as their markets mature, those innovations no longer get the attention they deserve."

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"Challenging the customer to ask “What am I actually paying for?” and “What aspects of this offer do I really need?” begins to revive the conversation between buyer and seller."

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O truque é tentar concentrar as pessoas no valor e enviar a questão do preço para segundo plano. É fácil? Não, claro que não, mas é a única forma de todos termos um lugar neste mundo.