How To Charge More For Your Products Without Getting Complaints

I came home from the grocery store last week with a packet of barkTHINS. If you haven’t come across them yet, they’re delicious. Little slivers of chocolate bark mixed with fruit or nuts, or to quote their tagline: “Your perfectly portioned, irresistibly indulgent snacking sidekick”. They’re not cheap though. A small 4oz bag will set you back $5. That’s a lot more expensive than the chocolate items it sat beside on the shelf, but the packaging caught my eye. It felt like a quality product. It had eye catching design and a fun description for the product. The promise continued with the product itself. It certainly ticked all the taste boxes. Discussing them with a colleague later that day (Yes, my conversations are really interesting), we got into a price discussion. I asked her if she thought they were expensive, to which she replied: “But they’re Fair Trade“. Price never even came into it for her.

So here’s the thing, if you want to charge more for your product, your service, your time, whatever it is you sell, you have to be a number of different things:

You have to be different. In a world of same, how do you stand out? Is it your packaging, your marketing, what is it that differentiates you from the “me-too” competitors. In a world of noise, be the signal.
You must be valuable. Value is paramount. You can charge any price you want as long as the customer deems it of good value. Value does not mean cheap, it means that the promise and the experience were aligned and the outcome met or exceeded expectations. You want to exceed. Quality should be greater than competitors of any price point.
It helps to have a shared purpose. barkTHINS buys their ingredients from FairTrade sources only. This aligns with the values of a customer willing to pay more for to a company for a product that they share values with.
Be personalized. Jeff Bezos of Amazon talks about the “MeConomy” and how he wishes he had 66 million storefronts, each one personalized to the preferences of each of his customers. If what you sell can be tailored specifically to me based on my precise needs, then your competitors are left playing catchup with their one size fits all models.
Be emotional. When you sell to my heart instead of my head, I’ll dig deeper every time to feed my emotions. It’s irrational, but so are human beings. We buy with our hearts every time.

Having these five attributes in play for what you sell means you are not a commodity product, but a premium product. A product which you can charge more for, deliver more margin, create preference and serve a bigger purpose. Without complaints.