Consumer behaviour is a tricky thing to understand but then so are the simple mistakes that businesses often make with their pricing.

Last year, I visited a food retailer (who will remain unnamed) that had snacks at £2.20 for one box or £2.00 for two (you may need to read that again, it isn't a typo!). Surely, the price was wrong? If you have read my blog post on What is Decoy Pricing you may believe it's a very clever strategy to make the purchase of 2 or more boxes so irresistible that the consumer will buy them. After all, the theory of Decoy pricing suggests that the consumer stops comparing 'shall I buy the snacks or not' and switches to 'shall I buy 1 or 2 boxes'. The main doubt I had was that this retailer had often advertised offers such as '25% off' on the shelves but the checkout systems didn't reflect the discount so it could be a foolish pricing error.

Recently, I came across another pricing situation that's slightly different. A different retailer was offering a meal deal for £3 consisting of any sandwich, drink and side. It was just before 1 pm and all that was left of the sandwiches were the heavily discounted 'must be eaten today'. 'This got me thinking:

Had people stopped buying the meal deal because they didn't see the value in it with discounted sandwiches?

Although the discounted sandwiches + drink (and possibly a side) were in some cases cheaper than the meal deal, why are they still remaining?

It seems that the idea of one price for everything is so simple and attractive that we prefer to go with that option. Who wants to stand there calculating the price individually nowadays or be lazy but take the risk of buying a discounted sandwich and still end up paying more than the bundled deal? The bundled deal solution is much more attractive when we are talking a few pennies or pounds.

In conclusion, I believe the first retailer was using decoy pricing while the bundled offerings of the second retailer made sense - although if they want to sell off food that expires very soon then a different pricing strategy for these items should be considered. What are your thoughts?

In the past 8 years, I have certainly had many challenges creating and writing content for customers but it has given me the opportunity to refine the process so that better content can be done more efficiently. Here are 7 great tools you should consider:

Grammarly - Avoid bad spellings and grammar with this great app. You can integrate Grammarly into your processes, whether that's gmail for emails. your app you use for scheduling content or Google Docs. Although it annoys me from time to time when it isn't right, it's the best I've used and I couldn't live without it.

Stencil - This online app helps you quickly create images for social media as well as images for your website or email marketing. As well as Stencil, Canva is another tool that's more popular as well as Pablo (from Buffer) and Relay.that.

Ezgif - This online tools has the strap line 'animated GIFs made easy' but it's more than that. If you have ever tried to upload a video to Twitter, Facebook and Instagram you are most likely to have come across issues such as it being too long for Twitter, not square enough for Facebook or too short for Instagram. Sigh! The ezgif app allow you to resize, crop, shorten and even convert videos from GIF to MP4 and much more!
​
WhatFont - This Chrome extension allows you to hover over wording on any website and see what font is being used. If you are creating images with wording then you can make sure your brand is consistent by using the same font throughout.

Eye Dropper - This Chrome extension is similar to WhatFont but is for colours. Add the extension, visit a site and hover over a part of the site and it will show you the colour as well as provide you with the exact colour code which you can then use in your image design or web coding.

Rawshorts - There are various solutions for creating fun, educational and promotional videos and Rawshorts is worth considering. The free version has limitations (no surprise there!) but it's good enough to create some great looking videos. Some of our animated videos on YouTube were created with Rawshorts.

Lumen5 - Quickly and easily turn your blog posts into a video - or add a video version to your blog posts! All you have to do with Lumen5 is add the URL of your blog post (or copy and paste the blog wording) and this handy app will break the blog post into multiple frames and add images based on the wording. If your wording says 'how to cook a great dish' then it will return images related to cooking or a kitchen. Make some changes and add some background music and you are ready to go! 

These are just a selection of useful tools and based on our experience but if you would like to share your experience of other apps why not get in touch or share it with us on social media? Don't forget to tag us when you do.

Get in touch if you need help with your content marketing.

When I graduated in International Business, a course that was very marketing focused, I went on to work for larger corporations in what could now be labelled traditional marketing. I accept that a lot has changed since then but what I learned and performed in terms of marketing included:

- Developing products and solutions that met the benefits of the customer
- Understanding customer needs and how the customers' mind works
- Integrating sales and marketing activities as a single unit
- Pricing a product inline with it's perceived value and in a way that maximises profit
- and much more!

The average social media marketer might not, for example, understand how the whole lead generation process should look, how power words such as 'now' or 'limited' make a difference, what the best colour is for a call to action button (orange is usually best) or that black conveys professionalism in artwork while blue conveys trust.

That's not to say that the marketer isn't smart, it's that focus is on how social media works and how content should be formatted and scheduled.

Marketing has required skills in many areas, so a video agency or an SEO expert isn't expected to understand how to develop a marketing strategy for a customer or why customers behave the way they do.

My book Psychology in Marketing and Sales discusses many other elements that marketing involves including the customer buyer journey, why we decide to buy a specific product or service and how we are influenced by different ways in which a product or service is positioned.

As a business grows, think twice about who you hire and how they can help. If you are serious about business growth then an expert in video, social media or email marketing (or SEO) should be considered, but having a marketing manager who looks at the bigger picture and brings the many marketing elements together should be a top priority!

Decoy pricing is a very clever way to make a different product offering more attractive by offering an inferior or decoy price. The term 'decoy pricing' was widely written about by Dan Ariely after he discovered Decoy pricing being used by the Economist magazine. He consequently undertook research which proved that Decoy pricing worked.

Here's an example of Decoy Pricing being used:

Online learning courses: $65
Printed learning materials: $130
Online access and printed learning materials: $130

In this example, the printed learning materials (middle option) is the decoy price. It makes no sense when you can have online access as well for the same price. Without this decoy price, there are two options and most people are likely to order the online learning courses but when the decoy price is introduced there is a significant shift and more people buy the Online access and printed learning materials instead. The decoy pricing acts to move the human mind away from comparing the lower priced option and instead to compare the two options at $130 - therefore deciding to purchase the last option with access to both printed and online learning materials.