FAQs
Because everybody has questions that demand a little answer. Yeah baby.
Frequently Asked Questions
MindMafia.com make courses on how to price using psychology called PsychoPricing. Other than MindMafia, you need to know what your bottom line for pricing should be – if you’re selling physical goods, you may want to work out what profit you have to make to stay in business! Check in with your accountant if you have one.
Pricing psychology is a broad term, and covers many different ways of approaching pricing. If you believe that people are not rational (tip: they are not), then you need to understand how they buy and what emotions are involved. At MindMafia we look at research from psychology and broader behavioural science, as well as neuroscience and our own research, which we conduct for big businesses.
You can learn about pricing at MindMafia.com in our PsychoPricing course, which is all based on behavioural science and psychology. Alternatively, if you have lots of time, get yourself down to your local library – look for books and academic papers on price psychology, pricing cognition etc. Take snacks. Some of those academic papers can be pretty dry!
When setting your prices, you need a good understanding of the customer you are targeting , and their own preferences. What does the thing that they are buying SAY about them? Are they a committed bargain hunter looking for ways to save money? Or are they a time-pressed business owner, trying to solve a problem? Before you price, you need to know your market. Then you can strike the right price.
If it makes me laugh, as much as you like. And if there's swearing in it, extra. (See MrBingo).
Pricing is hard because our own doubts and insecurities can get in the way of choosing a price. We also worry about being punished by potential customers by getting it wrong.
It’s said that you only need 1000 true customers to run an online business. Think about making 1000 sales. What price would you need to charge to make a healthy living? People often panic in pricing an online course, and charge too much. In the same way that they panic about charging too little for in-person services. Your time is your most valuable resource in life, and you will never be able to buy it back. A digital product, being downloaded by a customer, demands close to ZERO of your time. If you’re offering a digital product with a live course element (such as access to you) this should be more expensive. Because you’re going to die. Use your time well. What would you charge for your time if you only had a year to live? We tend to undervalue our time too much.
There are expensive business coaches and cheap ones. The real question is what results are you offering? If you help someone making 100,000 a year make 200,000 you’re going to be worth a lot. If you’re helping yoga teachers go from broke to less-broke, probably not so much.
Yes. Research shows that it’s better to have more things on offer than less, but not so many that you overwhelm your customers with too much choice. It’s a topic we cover at length in PsychoPricing.
All services are basically offering one of two things - 1) it’s all done for you, and 2) you set it up and you do the majority of the work. Decide whether you are selling to the time-poor or the cash-poor business owner. If you’re selling to the time-poor, you’re offering SPEED. If you’re selling to the cash-poor, then you’re offering a cheap Do-It-Yourself option.
Probably not. We like to keep this for our little business clients. As a rule, we steer clear of global conference calls, people telling us what to do, and wearing itchy suits which make use feel like we're back at school, while talking to old white dudes. Which is why we do the minimum of corporate pricing work. Unless you're offering to pay us a lot of money. In which case, think of us like a very selective, high-class prostitute, who only dates billionaires. Handsome ones.
By results. People aren’t looking for pictures, they are looking for the feeling those pictures give them. Are you looking to make a sassy entrepreneur look the part to help her sell to better clients? Are you offering a bride the chance to capture her happy day and take away the worry that anything will be missed? More expensive offerings must remove MORE doubt. Give more assurance of a good result.
If you’re running a live event, you need to work out WHO you are making money from. Are you providing amazing, interesting content? Then your audience pays. Are you providing a free day for your audience, and charging other businesses to come and speak to them/provide some content of value and pitch your audience? It’s a different model. Also, you can run the event and get one sponsor, such as a company who wants to be associated with it, for brand reasons. For example:
- Conference Model – TED. The audience pays a lot to hear amazing content, and network with amazing people. Ditto Music concerts.
- Industry conferences – the organiser offers free passes to the buyers, and the sellers have to pay to be in the room to talk/present.
- Sporting events – The French Open, Cricket, Baseball. Brands pay to have their name alongside.
We do. The PsychoPricing course is our first online course, as for the last few years we’ve been training people in person on how to make better decisions using behavioural science. We create research into what makes people buy, help sales teams sell more, and show writers how to structure copy to help them market better. Sometimes we do comedy too. Badly.
Your price is an indication to your customers of how you value your products and services. Also, you sound needy. Are you a Libran?
Pricing for sales needs to combine both a good deal for the customer, and a pricing strategy which doesn’t lower the perceived value of what you’re selling.
Almost every picture on the site has been made by us. The others came from stock photos where it turns out it's really expensive to buy a load of tiny scientists with a brain. We use Preiser 00 gauge figures, and Hornby H0 figures. We also get sent figures by our friends, and we always use these in pictures. If you want to send us tiny people, we will totally feature them and use them in social media. Pop them in the post to: Behave London, PO Box 659, Brentford, United Kingdom, TW8 1BT. Don't forget to include your email or social media lnks so we can find you and thank you!
There are ways to talk about your price verbally in a way which makes it easier for the customer to buy. There are also two buying states of mind – you can learn how to market to both types of buyer using something called “regulatory focus”. We break it down for you in the course, and show you the different phrases you can use in ads an on your landing pages.
If it doesn’t then the entire mission of this website, to help little business owners, is a failure and we should just go eat cake. I mean, if you’re trying to sell the unsellable, like a tour of dog-poops-of-New-York, or rainproof hats for goldfish, we’re in trouble. But pretty much anyone can using pricing strategies to increase their sales and profits.
Discounts can be really tricky, and can backfire and make your product look overpriced in the first place. There are other strategies you can try instead, like bundling. All the tips are in the PsychoPricing course.
- We're all closer to death than we think. Make the very most of being alive and do not work with clients you hate, or date people who make you question yourself.
- Decisions make themselves. If you have to talk yourself INTO it, you don't want to do it. If you're having to talk yourself OUT of it, you do want to do it.
- Don't trust people who say "trust me", particularly if it involves a shot of Tequilla.
- Always drink two large glasses of water before bed after a large night out.
- Get some toast-tongs. Do not stick the knife in the toaster to get the toast out. This will almost certainly lead to 1 being immediately and electrifyingly true.
It's normal for you to feel uncomfortable about pricing your products. It's normal for you to feel anxious about pricing your products. As human beings, we have a strong tendency to avoid being punished by others. This is a good normal survival trait. But it can really trip us up when we try to price.
There are lots of visual tricks you can use to present your price on a page, and ways to make it seem less like money. We cover these in PsychoPricing, in a step-by-step guide you can implement on your webpages, brochures, or menu design.
We run a behavioural insight agency, in London, England. So we do a lot of bespoke behavioural reseach projects, which is a nice way of saying "read complex stuff, and then test in the real world to see what works". MindMafia came about because our other website is a bit boring and you don't want to go to a website and read about pensions, do you? Well, if you insist.
Thanks for noticing, you savvy thing you. It's because having more than 6 items on page starts to overwhelm the reader's brain. And also, have you tried to write a page of FAQ's? So I've thrown in a few red herrings. GET IT? RED HERRINGS! Honesty, we're wasted at this. Should have gone into joke writing, or invented a time-machine, so I could go back to 1990 and have a quiet word with myself about that pink velour tracksuit.
