Marketers – Stop Feeling Dirty About Being Cheap

The importance of your brand being considered good value for money.

by Ken Roberts

Chief Innovation Officer at Forethought

Image: Forethought

Surely the greatest myth in marketing is that if your product or service is considered highly competitive on price, then it is also considered poor quality. Marketing practitioners’ misconception is based on the idea that the pricing mechanism inherently conveys information about quality. Advocates of this idea are overlooking buyers’ belief in value for money. That is, an item can be of great quality and priced competitively.

Value for money is the best performing, non-financial lead indicator of consumer choice, and it should be the single greatest pursuit of every marketer to lead their category on that metric.

While we are discussing myths, let’s tackle the other major pricing fallacy. That is, to be considered price competitive, the product or service needs to be discounted. A common misunderstanding about price is that it is all about dollars and cents. Consumers forget their dad’s birthday, yet the brand owners assume the consumer will know their product’s price to the penny.