Sometime between 2009 and 2012 a man I knew at church, who ran a catering company, gave me the best pricing lesson I have ever had, and it took him one sentence. When a customer asked him to make a job cheaper, his version was, sure we can make it cheaper. But… would you like ham or lamb? The customer gets the cheaper job, and gets told before any money moves what the cheaper job is made of, so the number comes down and the truth about what the number buys comes down with it, out loud, in the same breath. I learned this when I was a Christian - best thing I learned from 8 years at church. The dodgy version keeps the first half and drops the question, cheaper, sure, and the lamb turns into ham somewhere the customer can’t see.
At BookPrint I turned the caterer’s question into a house rule about one word. In my business no one was allowed to use the word price, only cost. Price just sounds like it is some bullshit you made up to make money, cost sounds like that is the cost of the work. A customer says, oh so the price is $1000, can I get a discount, and you say, uhh, sure I can give you a 10% discount, and now you sound like you made the first number up. The same customer says, oh so the cost is $1000, can I get a discount, and the only answer left is, yes we can reduce the cost, here are some lower cost options.
The rest of the pricing sat on the website as formulas. When I was designing books for clients we had some formulas that were published on our website. It made it easy for me, easy for them, and people didn’t ask for discounts. Simple text, think novels, $200 + $9 per 1,000 words. Complex text, think christian books with verses in italics and pull quotes, $450 + $18 per 1,000 words. Coffee table books, where the book layout is more art than pure graphic communication, $2,000 + $15 per page. I never put an hourly rate on the page, because they don’t care how many hours it takes you, it is completely irrelevant to your client if it takes you 2 or 20 hours to design their book, and a per hour cost automatically communicates to them you don’t know how long it will take, and therefore you don’t know what you are doing.
I ran the guarantee the same way, a thing we were going to do regardless, said in advance. If someone is unhappy with what you made you were always going to refund them, I know I would have, so we wrote it down, if you are unhappy with our design we will give you a 100% money back refund. Good marketing looks at things you do, and tells the customer about them upfront. Don’t be the mechanic that does amazing work, offers courtesy cars, gives you free coffee, is happy to accept random phone calls - but never tells anyone so everyone goes next door to someone who only offers courtesy cars but is busy because they told everyone about it.
It’s very simple to build trust, make a statement, a promise, then deliver on it. Then repeat this process. Make a promise in a headline: Gain a strategic overview of P/E ratios in 5 minutes. Deliver on the promise: ensure your article gives readers a strategic overview of P/E ratios within 5 minutes. Make a promise: Book a call back at a convenient time. Deliver on the promise: call them exactly at their chosen convenient time. In my notes I called the unit a trust-promise pair, one promise and its delivery. The caterer’s question is one pair, the formula on the website is another, the refund line is a third, and enough of them in a row is what a customer means when they say they trust you. None of them required me to be a good person, only a person who did the thing he said.
I don’t really want this to be ethical, I just want it to be rational. Any movement away from truth, eventually forces the customer to justify your choice of words as: ignorant, incompetent, inadvertently selfish, or malicious. Those are the four files, and there is no fifth file marked it worked. If your headline reads “double your revenue in 12 months” this is a lie. It is not a universally applicable truth. If your product on average reduces opex by 10% for dentists, it would be possible to write a compelling true advertisement such as ‘reduce opex by 10%, true result averaged from 96 past customers’. Only dentists arrive, only the ones the product can help, and the honesty has paid for itself before anyone has said the word. If your business makes assumptions about customers you reach out to them as an intervention.
The same number reads two different ways depending on the promise it sits under. Independent BMW Mechanic. Services from $89. Car Mechanic: 100+ 5 Star Reviews. Services from $89. How much do you trust this guy? Under the BMW line the $89 stops the scroll, how can they be that specialised and good and that cheap. Under a hundred reviews and no speciality it is a low number with nothing narrow behind it, the kind that gets checked. The price didn’t change. What it was attached to did.
When BookPrint was sold in 2020 it went for not much, wound up more than sold, and a business partner who had worked for me for a few years and held a small stake was owed his share of not much. I gave him about ten grand, which is more than he should have theoretically got if he just looked strictly at the values, and for me it was important to make sure I’d paid him back, kind of, as what I’d spoken about. I bought a little cross satchel, a little tiny bag as a gift for him, got the cash out and put it in there, drove to his house, told him I’d got him something, and threw him the bag. The valuation said one number, the promise said another.
The mortgage business I’m in now says its pricing out loud before anyone has signed anything. Generally the fee is only paid if the work is completed, so if you are thinking about restructuring and we advise you and you decide not to, there’s no obligation to pay anything because no work was actually done. The advice is free. For most mortgage transactions we get paid completely by the lender and it’s a completely free service, and you can see the commission payments in our disclosure statement. Do we get paid more for bigger transactions? Yes, we do. Often it’s a percentage, so the amount we get paid if it was a $50,000 mortgage would be very small, whereas if it was a $10 million mortgage, it would be very large. By the time you’ve got up to $10 million of mortgage, there would be multiple accounts, multiple fixed terms, and the work grows with the mortgage. Lamb, in other words, and the customer is told it’s lamb before they order.
I’ve been on the other side of the tally too, and I kept it the way my customers kept it on me. A gym signed me up, and during the signup they said a trainer would get in touch in the next few days so I could learn how to use the equipment and get started. Nobody rang. I had already tried once before joining and never heard back, so that was two promises and no trainer. When I cancelled, the reply asked about my vaccine passport and offered to set me up with a trainer, so I answered with the bank statement instead: you started charging me in December not October, and you’ve charged me 8 payments of $51.39 so the total refund amount would be $411.12 (screenshot is attached). I’d filed them, one of the four, and the arithmetic did the filing for me, because 8 times $51.39 is a number, and a number doesn’t need a feeling attached before it can be sent.
Every one of those promises was made by me or to me, across a counter, down a phone, in an email with a screenshot attached, and when one broke, both of us knew where the other worked. Most trade doesn’t happen like that now. The customer arrives through a machine that made the introduction, wrote the headline, set the expectation and took a cut, and the machine has promises of its own to keep, to somebody else. I could keep promises across a counter, face to face. What happens when a platform makes the promises for you?
