Price, Value, Perception
Price is what you pay, Value is how you feel about the transaction and Perception is how the customer processes your company before they experience the price & value.
Recently, I had a conversation with a restaurant owner client who was having issues with potential customers understanding why his chicken wings cost more. He uses a bigger, better quality wing than his competitors. Yet, they were having problem conveying to the customer why they should buy his wings.
Problem: How do we make the customers understand that my clients’ wings are bigger, better and worth paying more money for?
During the conversation with my client on this topic we decided that he needed to do more research, so he went to every competitor in town and bought a basket of chicken wings. Sure enough every competitor’s basket of wings had more wings, but the quality on those little wings was not as good and they were less than half the size of his when we put them next to each other. So what to do? The traditional way to sell wings in the town was to sell them by the piece and that’s how everyone had always done it. My next instruction to my client was to weigh the wings in every basket including his own. We found that his 10 wings weighed about one and a half pounds. All the rest weighed less than a pound per order. So, now how do we convey that his wings were better?
Solution: We thought about the problem and we decided that we needed to change the way he sold his wings by selling them by the pound. That’s right his 10 piece order would now become the 1 & ½ pound order and so on. We could still tell the customer how many wings that our order would have in it, but now we also had the information to tell them that his competitors same 10 piece order had one pound instead of what his competitors had. In changing the terminology and by researching his competitors we found a way to change his customers Perception. Since then, his wing orders are up and he is now able to charge more for his wings instead of stooping to his competitor’s level and trying to compete on price alone.
Words of Wisdom: If you don’t like what your competitor is doing or how they are selling a product that competes with yours find how you are better and what makes you better and spin it in your favor. Then sell THAT!
