How to understand user psychology and play the price game?

JD.com once had a female vice president who worked as a salesperson. Because the profit margin of keyboards and mice was low, she lowered the price by 50 cents at a time, just like buying vegetables. When drinking with a supplier, his intracranial pressure was too high, resulting in ruptured capillaries in his eyeballs, and the entire white of his eyeballs were dyed red.

Why is it worth her drinking like this for just fifty cents?

If the supplier reduces the price by 50 cents, the profit may increase by 5%. If this sector has a profit of billions, then a dinner can bring JD.com an additional profit of five million.

When users buy a product, "price" must be one of the top three considerations. By learning to understand customer psychology and playing the price game , you can not only sell in one day the same amount as you would have sold in three days before, but you can also make half a month's profit equal to what you would have made in a month before.

So what are the ways to play these price games?

1. Pricing before product launch

Price Anchoring

The anchoring effect means that when people need to make a quantitative estimate of something, they will use certain specific values ​​as a base point. When making decisions, people will unconsciously pay too much attention to the basis points, which will affect their estimates and judgments.

Price anchoring is to influence users' evaluation of the prices of other products by giving them an initial price. Both high and low prices can act as anchors.

High price anchor

Tiffany once launched a paper clip that cost more than 1,000 yuan, which was more expensive than its own sterling silver rings. In addition to paper clips, they also launched bookmarks with a unit price of nearly 10,000 yuan and wallets with a unit price of 20,000 yuan.

From left to right: paper clip, bookmark, wallet

These high-priced products actually serve as an anchor, giving customers the impression that Tiffany is a very expensive luxury brand . When customers choose other Tiffany products, they will unconsciously compare other products with these high-priced products, and they will have a feeling that other products in the store are very cheap.

Low price anchor

Low price anchoring is the most commonly used tactic by merchants.

Some hotels will offer a small number of low-end room types (commonly ordinary king-size rooms) as special offer rooms to lower the starting price. Doing so can not only improve the ranking on the search page, but also make the apparent price on the search page lower, making users think that the hotel's rooms are cheaper than other hotels, thereby attracting users to click.

The hotel offers a small number of special price rooms to consumers at a low price

Supermarkets also like to use some super low-priced products as low-price anchors, giving customers the impression that all products in this supermarket are very cheap. But in reality, the supermarket may raise the prices of some other commodities, and if customers are confused, they may fall into the trap.

Lower the price

It is also common to split the price at a low level, and there are generally two ways to do it.

Dismantle small units

One is to split the unit price from large units to small units. Gyms like to attract customers by saying that the average price is only xx yuan per day. If you like seafood, you may have come across some shops charging xx yuan per 50g for fish. The purpose of breaking the products into small units is to make the products look less expensive and increase consumers' shopping motivation.

Ant Huabei also uses this method, showing everyone the daily interest rate instead of the annual interest rate. After reading this article, you can calculate the annual interest rate of Ant Huabei installment. Are you shocked after the calculation?

Disassembly process

Another way is to disassemble by process. In the seafood market, many restaurants do not have seafood, and customers need to buy their own seafood and bring it to the store for processing. Customers pay for the seafood and also have to pay the restaurant a processing fee. But customers often see these amounts as two charges rather than one, and the merchants also achieve the goal of making the products seem less expensive.

Deposit mechanism

The deposit mechanism can help screen users with high willingness to pay and assist companies in determining product pricing.

Filter users

Friends who have organized sharing sessions should have encountered this problem: at a free experience sharing session, the number of people who show up may be only 60% of the registered number; and among those who show up, only 20% may be truly worth your continued operation and value extraction.

A nominal deposit would solve this problem. Whether it is 9.9 or 19.9, collecting a deposit can help screen out those who are truly interested. There is a high probability that these people are willing to pay you, so it is worth your effort to continue operating.

Assist with pricing

Real estate developers like to sell VIP cards for home buyers before construction of a property starts. After spending 10,000 yuan to buy the card, this 10,000 yuan can be used as a discount of 20,000 yuan when a house is put on the market. In addition, the developer may also give some benefits such as priority in choosing a house.

In addition to raising some funds for developers, VIP cards also play a major role in helping developers determine the price of new homes. If VIP card sales are hot, the developer will judge that the property is very popular and can set the price higher when it is launched. If sales are sluggish, the developer may have to replan the project.

2. Adjusting prices during sales

Price Discrimination

Limited time offer

Taobao Tmall Double Eleven and JD.com 618 are the most typical limited-time specials. In order to buy low-priced goods, users have to select and purchase their favorite products within a limited time. Moreover, some merchants have given more stringent restrictions, such as "Instant discount/free XXX for the first XX people" or "Order between 00:00 and 00:03 and get XX" and so on.

Rich people will not wait until this time to compete with others to place orders, so they have to pay a higher price. But price discrimination is not a derogatory term. It is because of price discrimination that people with less economic conditions can also enjoy good products.

Limiting options

Reducing the price of a specific style is also a form of price discrimination. For example, if the same model of shoes comes in three colors, blue, black and red, and only the red shoes are reduced in price, then friends who like this style but are not so particular about the color can happily take the shoes home.

This case also has another way of selling with price discrimination: the colors are sent randomly, and if you want to choose a specific color, sorry, you have to pay more. Auspicious numbers are equivalent to raising the price of specific models - if you want your license plate number, house number, mobile phone number or QQ number to be an auspicious number, you will definitely have to pay extra.

Sometimes the price of "possibly defective items" will be reduced. The reason why the word "may" is added is because the products that have been reduced in price are not necessarily defective products. Sometimes merchants want to sell some goods at a low price, but due to lack of channels , they can only sell them through the original channels. This leads to a problem - consumers who have paid too high a price before will come to the store and ask for a refund. If there are too many such people, it will put a lot of pressure on the merchants.

Creating a new low-priced product of the same model, but adding a note such as "may have minor defects, but have been personally selected" can avoid such problems and will not suppress the sales of your own regular-priced products.

Punitive pricing

Punitive pricing causes users who buy later to pay more than users who buy earlier. In order to avoid paying too high a price, users will choose to buy early. The New World Marketing Course that became popular on WeChat Moments some time ago is a typical example of "punitive pricing + multi-level distribution". The course was originally priced at 19.9 yuan, but the price increased by 5 yuan for every 10,000 people who purchased it. For a time, netizens rushed to buy and forward the video, and finally the official account that published the course was blocked by WeChat .

In just two minutes, 1,000 people bought the New World Marketing Course

Package Sales

Packages

Selling double tickets for a concert can encourage users to promote the concert on their own initiative. Assuming that the organizer's pricing strategy is 188 yuan for a single ticket and 288 yuan for a double ticket, the normal user's first reaction is to invite friends to buy double tickets with themselves, thus achieving the organizer's goal of letting users promote and attract customers spontaneously.

Group Buying

The most famous group-buying platform is Pinduoduo. Pinduoduo's model is that one person initiates a group purchase, and the group purchase is successful after five people join. The group-buying model indirectly encourages users to persuade other users to consume. Some users even set up WeChat groups to facilitate group buying, saving operators a lot of marketing costs.

3. Product after-sales

Bonus/cashback mechanism

Paid courses sometimes offer bonuses to attract users. On the one hand, it can make users feel that they can get bonuses and may eventually earn back the money they spent on the course (but in reality, most people think too much, as only a few people can persist in finishing the course, let alone getting bonuses). On the other hand, it can set up benchmark users to encourage other users to learn from them. After all, for paid courses, encouraging users to learn can increase the repurchase rate of the product. They don’t want to do business with users only once.

There are many ways to play the price game, and skillfully applying one or two of them can improve the operating conditions of your products. If in actual application, the pricing methods of pre-sale pricing, mid-sale price adjustment and post-sale rewards are combined and utilized according to the product characteristics, it will no longer be difficult to achieve rapid growth of the product.

The author of this article @Heinrich Z compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

Product promotion services: APP promotion services, advertising platform, Longyou Games