Are You Spoiled Rotten? Sorry to Say that Many of You Are

Good point.

I hate to admit that I used to let the negative pervade my mind and it hurt my potential.

Then I realized there was something to all that mumbo jumbo pseudo psychology, and I have done extraordinarily better for adopting it since.

I lost the negatives in my early 30's, and it forever changed my life for the better.

I've worked in broadcast radio for 25 years, and have literally dealt with thousands of advertisers in that time.

There is a truism about clients in radio...the less they spend, the more of a pain in the asteroid they will be.

Someone that drops a couple thousand dollars on a campaign writes the check, turns in their copy points (or already-produced commercial) and then counts their profits from their marketing campaign with us.

However...I dread to the depths of my soul the sight of a local business owner that turns up and spends $50. They are an endless fountain of demands.

• "I want a female voice for my commercial."
• "Can I get four or five different commercials done and just rotate them during my schedule?"
• "Now, these commercials have to run during the best parts of the day; I've got to see some results!"
• "No, not that female; one that sounds...less female, y'know?"

And on and on and on...

From my experience, this behavior is based on mindset:

For those with limited success, money is a goal.

For those that have experienced success, money is a tool used to get even more money.

Therefore:

This, a million times over.

The people that expect a million percent return on their investment handed to them on a silver platter will always exist; it's a pretty prevalent mindset.

The choice to be made is whether or not to cater to them. (This is always a mistake, by the way, because if they're not wildly successful after spending their money with you, they're not happy...and a budget of $50 won't do diddly-squat for you in terms of results in radio advertising.)

Back in the dark ages (the early '90s), a new "dollar store" opened in our town, right at the beginning of December. They paid for a live remote broadcast on our station at their grand opening and requested that I do it.

This was a smallish store, with not much room. By the start of the second hour, they literally had people standing in line on the sidewalk to go in. At this point, the manager accosted me.

"Look at this!!! This is a waste of a lot of my money!"

Completely puzzled, I replied "Ummm...how so? There are more customers here than you have room for; I think a line of people waiting to get in is a success."

She glowered and said "Yes...BUT THEY'RE NOT BUYING ANYTHING!!! I want my money back; I'm going to get another station out here to do this...they're a lot cheaper, anyway. I should have known you were a rip-off."

I explained that it wasn't our job to make them purchase anything; our job was promotional...the money was spent so that we would generate interest and excitement about their grand opening, and get customers in the door.

She never understood what I was saying. They were literally in violation of the fire code due to the number of people in the store, but her advertising was a failure because they didn't do anything with the attention they received.

Sure enough...the next week, one of our competitors were there, drew a decent crowd of (as it turns out) non-buyers, and she was still unhappy.

Before summer came around, the store was closed.

The moral of this story?

People are stupid. They expect miraculous results from minimal effort, and it's always someone else's fault when they don't get the results they fantasized over. And the more they're concerned about the price...the less likely they are to succeed.

Healthy discussion, great topic by EBR.

Let me tell you what I do with one of my favorite physical products (affiliate). The bare minimum ("portable") version of it starts at sub-100 when Amazon has those discounts going. The regular one also starts below $1000, in fact I have seen the regular one sell down to $500-$600 etc.

Guess the price of the models that I sell? $2000-$4000. And people buy them and if human beings had tails then they would not stop wagging them.

Because, the higher ones have a very clear value that I bring out in my sales process for this item. I have to present the pros and cons of each in a language that the customer understands.

So, this essentially mean, I have stoppedd a huge number of buyers from buy from underpriced and/or under-quality seller (mostly under-quality) and even made them not buy rather than trying to sell them at the cheapest.

At WF, yes, people have got too habituated to prices - almost to a point where maybe some of them don't even try to understand the fact that there could be differences in product quality...

I love what Rob (CCMusicMan) says - if your option is to restrict price then be smart and target the bird's eye rather than the whole bird with your product. Target the bird's ear in your next product and the bird's feathers in yet another product. It solves both ways. The seller needs to only write about the eyes and not the ears or feathers this time, so the efforts are targeted. And the buyer has the option to pick up only the text s/he needs about the bird's eyes, and doesn't feel that s/he is paying for the bird's feathers too in spite of knowing about the feathers already. If the buyer also wants to understand the feathers and ears of the bird then great - let him/her pick up the appropriate volumes. And then, I would go and also say that sell the whole set of books as a bundle to places where people would buy them, but as appropriately priced products (price being high enough).

In a way, this is like selling Shakespeare's works in parts rather than trying to sell the entire set of works in one bundle. The market segments are just different.