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How much should you charge? A priceless lesson I forgot – but you can profit from

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In this quickfire blog post, copywriting heavyweight Drayton Bird addresses the issue of price. What he suggests is a simple change in mindset which may make you rethink your next quote or product price point.
drayton bird

This is a quickie – but worth a lot to you.

At my first big job in London at Leo Burnett the marketing director Mickey Barnes – a very clever man – said something I immediately understood – then ignored for most of my life.

God alone knows how many hundreds of thousands of pounds it’s cost me.

He said:

“Price is a creative factor”.

What he meant was that your price says something about you.

Think about these three facts.

1. If it’s expensive people assume it must be good.

2. They will boast about how much they paid. It’s a way of convincing others – and themselves – that they’re successful.

3. Even if it isn’t that great they convince themselves it must be. They daren’t admit, especially to themselves, that they made a mistake.

I have sometimes charged the right price, thank God, but often failed to.

The more you charge the more you can afford to pick and choose your clients, the more it implies about the quality of what you offer. And the more you can afford to discount if you need to.

What we offer is damn good. It hardly ever fails to work.

But I still haven’t entirely profited from Mickey Barnes’s lesson.

You will find that what you’ll get from us is very, very hard to beat indeed and our prices are ludicrous.

We can afford it because we don’t have any fancy offices. In fact none at all. That was true before Covid.

But I’ll tell you what. As soon as this pandemic is over I’ll be putting them right up.

It’s never too late to make up for a stupid mistake.

So please don’t make it.

If you want results – and God knows we all need them now – rip me off while you can – http://draytonbird.net/agenq/.

Best,

Drayton

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Image by Michal Jarmoluk from Pixabay

Drayton Bird
Author: Drayton Bird

Drayton has helped sell everything from Airbus planes to Peppa Pig. His book, Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing, out in 17 languages, has been the UK’s best seller on the subject every year since 1982. He has also run his own businesses in the U.K., Portugal and Malaysia.

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