Hiding pricing
Sometimes when you browse a corporate site that they are making an concerted effort to make sure that you don’t see the price until you are already invested. Usually these sites want you to give personal information, have a sales representative contact you or dedicate time to starting the process. This is especially true in subscription services.
This is not okay. As marketers, we reserve the right to try to explain the value of our product or service before we say the prices. But asking someone to spend their time and attention on something is far different than mentally locking people in before allowing them to see the price.
The basis of our economy is based on rational decision making balancing value with price. By withholding the price, you remove one half of the equation. When they are finally allowed to see the price the equation has changed. Now the cost is balanced against the value of the product or service plus the loss of the time / personal information / effort if they do not take the service. This is subversive, and gaming the system. It takes paying from opt in to opt out, which uses our human preference towards opting in against us.
One example of this is eHarmony. In the first level of their website has no mention of the price of the service. They ask you to sign up and give your time and most personal information to take their personality profile before you see the price of the service. The price of the service is based on how much time you sign up for, and is not determined by any of the personal information you gave. There is no reason to withhold the pricing information other than to have us already invested in the service before we pay for it.
The whipping boy of poor sales and marketing critics, the car dealer, uses the same tactic. They withold the final price of the product at the last minute of the sale, often pocketing profit through fees. When I was looking for a used car at the end of the last year, I experienced this first hand. Dealers would want me to appraise my trade in before car even before letting me test driving their product. One sales person verbally strong armed us into his office after a test drive. I would never have bought a car with him no matter how good the deal, because he had destroyed our relationship with him and thus his brand. I apprehensively bring up used car dealers, but would you like your business to be using the same tactics as a used car dealer?
If a company is confident of both their value and their price, than they will present both alongside each other. At FireBrand, we are all about long-tail branding excercises based on respectful and valuable relationships with your customers. This hurts your brand. If you start your relationship with your customer by tricking them, some will hold you accountable for that.
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By Colin Finkle. Colin Finkle is an award winning industrial designer who works with large multinational brands everyday designing retail displays for FX Displays in Toronto, Canada. He is the principle designer at Firebrand Creative. He also writes for AMD’s FireUser.com blog.
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