Hello, and welcome back to the e-commerce impact podcast. For those of you who are listening to this between Christmas and new year, hope you had a lovely Christmas and that you are excited about having a fantastic new year. 

This week, we have a real treat for you. I am chatting to author podcast, Molina Palmer. Now I first came across Molina through her award-winning podcast, the brand new business, which I highly recommend you check out. She shares some fantastic insights into behavioral economics and how it can be applied to marketing and business. 

Super great podcast, highly recommend. And also her books, which are regularly recommended an e-commerce circles. Molina actually teaches applied behavioral economics through the human behavior lab at the Texas a and M university. And today she is here to talk to us about her new book, which is out in a few weeks early next year. The truth about pricing, Which explains the neuroscience of consumer behavior and how we can use it to improve pricing, increase sales, and create better. Brain-friendly messaging. So let's dive in. 

I am super excited to dig into this topic. So my first question for you is , what is behavioral economics for those who don't know? And why does it apply to pricing of products and specifically in e commerce too? Yeah, so behavioral economics, I like to say that if traditional economics and psychology had a baby, we would have behavioral economics.

And essentially the field came about because traditional economics had a problem in that it assumes logical people making rational choices in everything that they do. And as we're human, we know that that's not really the way that it works. And so what you end up with is models that predict what Someone has said people should do and not what they actually do.

And so it just doesn't predict accurately. And so what behavioral economics does is it has taken an approach of understanding the brain, the way people really make decisions and using those rules that the brain is using to choose. in order to set things up in a way that better communicates with the rules the brain is really using to make decisions.

So if it's not already obvious how it ties in with pricing, is that in being able to better communicate to people in a way that they want to be communicated to, to make it easier for them to make a decision. pricing and the way we message our products and services is very clearly overlapped with the overarching space of behavioral economics.

What I say from my company, from the brainy business and the work that I do. Really, we help you to figure out how to communicate so that customers buy and employees buy in. So, that is what behavioral economics is. And that's what I really love about the books of yours that I've read, is the way you don't just apply, like, this concept of behavioral economics to, Thinking about our customers and how we present our brand, but also you think about thinking about ourselves and our business and what's blocking us from taking action or what's making us make the wrong decision.

So that was a really neat thing. I thought about both your books. Awesome. Okay. So you say that traditional pricing advice kind of ignores psychology and actually creates overwhelmed for the business owner trying to figure out But they're pricing. How is your advice and an approach kind of different to what else is out there in terms of pricing advice?

Yeah, well, it's, we don't have to say it's all, but it's at least 98 percent psychology and the approach that's being taken there from, like you said, varying. Aspects and looking at it from different angles here. But really it is all rooted in psychology and when it comes to pricing to selling psychology is everything in the way both that people are looking to buy as well as how you approach the way that you're going to price and set up.

those products and services. So when you get into the truth about pricing the first chapter of part two, which is these like foundational six areas that you need to be thoughtful about, make decisions about, and I have prompts and things for the reader to go through. The first one is called. You, because the biggest hurdle, the biggest barrier to overcome when it comes to setting good prices and sticking to them in a way that people buy in is you, and that can be the collective you other people in the organization who are selling and whatnot, but we get in our own way all the time.

And so being able to understand how our brain is going to keep us. and when it comes to pricing, it's something that's really easy to put off for a long time. You know, it's important and everybody hates it. And the idea of having to do anything with it, it feels really scary. If we get it wrong, there are big consequences.

And so it gets to just be out there in the. Next week, I'll have more time and later I'll do this and then one day you wake up and think, Oh, no, the launch is Friday and we haven't picked a price yet and then it just at that moment. It's easy to justify picking a random price. What I typically see is either.

You know, like a dollar less than your competitor, or it's going to be some percentage markup over your known costs. And you vow that, you know, three or six months down the road, once things settle down again and you get through this launch, you'll spend more time and do it right. And that also never happens because of a bunch of principles that you read about in the book that keep us stuck.

So really addressing that and then thinking about the psychology of how you present items is Yeah, I would say like with the e commerce brands that I've worked with and talked to about this almost always their pricing strategy is based on like some kind of percentage markup, they're not thinking about, they're just thinking, what can I charge?

What's the right margin I should get, right? So why is that the wrong approach? And how, how would you advise an e commerce brand? What steps would you advise them to go through? And thinking about how to price their products that they're selling. Yeah. So the first thing is people almost never properly factor in all the expenses that are going into whatever it is that you're selling.

And, you know, especially if it's a, like, if you sell, whether it's jewelry or shelves or, you know, whatever else, it's easy to just look at those fixed. Materials, right? And even you have some allocation maybe of your time. But, are you thinking about the time that you're spending to write the copy that's going on the website?

The time that you're spending interacting with people when they ask you a question? You know, there are a lot of hidden aspects that we may forget about. So, for one the book does give some tips of things to be thinking about, though it's not fully focused on that. The other approach, though, is when it comes to buying and the truth about pricing, you know, not giving it away too early here, it's on page three of the book, too.

So the truth of about pricing is that it's not about the price. The number on the tag isn't what it's about. The things that all happen before the price are more influential as to whether or not someone is going to buy than whatever that number is itself. And so being thoughtful about those things, about the way that your brand feels to someone and how that lines up with what they're expecting.

And if it's a smooth and easy process for them is much more important than that. Actual price. So taking the time to be thoughtful about the value you're providing to your customer, helping them to see themselves in that item in a way that you just have to have it, you know, whatever that is, makes it to where the number kind of becomes a non issue because it's the thing that you can't wait.

Yeah, you give the example in the book of your golden octopus, which I can see sitting behind you. How can you explain that example to us and how that kind of illustrates the concept? I know. I feel like not to like, Ooh, there he is. He's over there. So yeah, the first chapter in the truth about pricing is called the golden octopus and it is this wonderful little, little guy that I have there that I ended up buying.

It was in a home goods shop that my husband and I love to visit. Octopus is my favorite animal and I just thought it was so, I don't know, it always caught my eye, you know, I never really thought about buying it. But when we were moving out of the city, went to go, you know, visit the shop one last time as we're walking around finishing up being Seattleites.

And he suggested that I get it, you know, as the sign of my new, it was while I was going to be going full time into consulting and all of this, it was like this Signifier of what it meant to be an entrepreneur and whatnot. And it was like the first thing I bought going to, to our new house. And I really love it.

And I you know, whenever I see it, it has this piece of what my life is and what it means for me. And the really important thing is I have no idea how much I paid for that thing. I do not remember at all what it costs. And that is again. The point, right, in this case because it's not about what that was.

It's about what it means. And even if I knew what it was, I think it was less than 50, whatever it was. So it's obviously not a real gold octopus. But with that, even if I, you know, if someone was going to offer me 25 or 35 or 50 or a hundred dollars for it, 250 for it, I don't think I would sell it because of what it says about my identity, you know, it's worth something different to me now.

I've. emblazoned it with this meaning that makes it to where I wouldn't feel good about selling it. And so we have these items, and aligning with the identity of the purchaser is really important, and you can be thoughtful about helping build that in even when you are thinking of a wider sort of audience here.

In the book, another example that I give that I really like that I know resonates with people is of grilled cheese sandwiches. And so with a grilled cheese sandwich, you know, it's easy to make, anybody could do so, even if you're a terrible cook, you could probably make that happen. And you know, it costs like a dollar to buy this stuff for it.

But then if we were to say, how much would you pay for one? If you really, really needed one, or this was a great grilled cheese, you're, you're willing to invest, you know, what would you pay? And so our listener can be thinking, you know, how much, if you're going to splurge. You know, what's the most you would spend?

And usually people will say 20, maybe like $25 if it's really good sandwich, you know? And then I let them know about a store, a restaurant in New York. It's called Serendipity three. And they have a $214 grilled cheese sandwich that's available on their menu. And they also have $200 french fries, and they have a thousand dollars vanilla sundae.

And people buy them, but, and you may say, Oh, well, that's just a PR stunt. Yes. And people still buy them, but you think about what this does, right? So if you end up going to, you see Serendipity 3, you've heard of them, you see that you're there, you go, Oh man, I'm not going to get 200 sandwich because that's a real deal.

But like, I'll get the 35 grilled cheese. Right. To like see and say I was there and then you're going to share on social media, be part of the experience. I talk about social proof in the book and how you use that. It's also a very scarce item, which comes into play for this really great, delicious grilled cheese.

So keeping all of that in mind, again, the price doesn't really come into play when we look at buying those, you know, particular items and that's not even the most expensive. Grilled cheese that's ever sold. I talk about the Virgin Mary grilled cheese, which sold on eBay for 28, 000. So you can sell anything for any price you want.

You just need to be thoughtful about how, how you set that up. And it's interesting in that example of the grilled cheese sandwich. Would you say that's a good example of price anchoring as well? Because if the normal person says 20, maybe 25, that's an example of them paying 35, but feeling like they've maybe got a deal, right.

Because of the anchoring. Yeah, yeah, so there is a whole section looking at anchoring and relativity in the book, which I know that you know, and so and the having that thousand dollar anchor makes it so where their 35 sandwich doesn't feel so much by comparison whereas if you're thinking about getting a Five or 10 sandwich.

And you see that they're 35 go, ugh, yikes. I don't want anything to do with that. Right. So the mistake that people tend to make in business is that we think we need to start low and then you like add on and work your way up to that expensive price of the big package of whatever it is that you're wanting to sell.

And that is absolutely wrong because you're anchoring someone on a low number first, which will make it so much harder for them to buy at. more expensive steps as you move your way up. And so even, you know, I have a, an example from a friend of mine. His name is Brian Ahern and he talks about, you know, going to buy a couch, you know, so if you go in, you see a couch that you love and you want to buy, you say, Hey, you know, how much is this couch?

And the person says, Oh 900. Oh, sorry, my mistake. It's 700. Okay. So we think about that. Now we take a step back. Same store, same couch, same everything you say, Hey, how much is this couch? And the sales rep says it's 500. Oh, I'm sorry, my mistake. It's 700. So the couch was never 900 or 500. It was always 700, but it feels super different.

In the two scenarios, we feel like we're getting a great deal in the one. And in the other case, you go like, that feels expensive. Is it really that nice? You know? So those anchors impact the way you feel about it, even when they were never really part of the equation. And so being thoughtful when you're pricing and.

things. It's really important. So the other piece of advice here is that you don't want whatever the thing is that you really want people to buy. I call this the best offer and the book definitely goes into selecting and curating your perfect best offer is that it should not be the most expensive thing.

That you offer because we need something bigger than that to help us scale back and feel good about whatever it is that high anchor is often your wingman. And again, I talked about creating wing wing men, you know, in the book as well. And so that wingman, its job is to help the best offer to look good.

And often that's done with a higher priced. wHere if we say, you know, Hey, we've got this thousand dollar thing. And this is an option that's available for you. And, you know, there's also the 750 item, which is great for most people and they move from that. And then also there's something for 500 bucks, right?

So we're maybe open to 750 when we started at a thousand, if you go the other way, it doesn't feel as good. Yeah. Yeah. So I can see the direct application of this, I think with like bundling. Like bundling products for e commerce. And there's probably also applications for where you've got an e commerce brand that has like, like different products that have.

You know, like of higher or lower quality, the different options that you have, although we see that a little bit less often in the DTC space is usually kind of like one product per category, but with bundling, yeah, start with the biggest bundle that, you know, that has everything in it. It's the deluxe and then have the lower priced ones as the second option.

I could see that really applying. Is there any other kind of direct applications you can think of with relating to Sort of websites or advertising. Yeah. So one thing that's important to note about bundles too, is you don't have to discount. To offer a bundle and so you can have the stuff be exactly the same price as it is outside of the bundle and it people don't invest as much time as we think they do going and checking and You know, if you go look at Amazon things like kids party supplies sometimes When you buy it as a pack, it's more expensive than if you were going to go buy the individual items, but you don't really realize it.

And, you know, I would rather in like. Pay the three bucks to not have to go hunt for 40 minutes to find all the junk I might need for, you know, we've got three kids around here. I don't need, I don't need that in my life, right? Totally. People that do want to and, you know, love getting the deal, they can go search around and that's totally fine.

But most people are okay paying it, being a little bit more expensive. So don't feel, don't be stuck on your own mental anchor of saying that bundles mean discounts. Because that's definitely not the case. And I talk a lot about how there's a whole category of companies that really shouldn't discount or do sales.

at all, and if they do, very, very rarely, which I'm guessing we might get to the other to answer your question more directly. Another way you could use anchors on a website would be, you know, on the landing page, the home page, it's very common to have a, you know, a scroll or a big header image of something that you're featuring.

That item, and again, you know, depending on the type of website, you may see a lot of those being anchored on, Something that's like a steal of a deal that you're not going to find anywhere in the website itself, you know, it's saying that, you know, as low as 5. 99 or something, and then you go in and everything is at least 20.

Again, so we've anchored you on the idea of this sale that nothing is going to live up to just being thoughtful. And I'm a big proponent of testing, of course, so you can see what works for your brand because clearly people sell things with this sort of approach. So you just want to make sure you're looking at it.

But if you do put in something that is. a really great, item, you know, the, the best thing out there again, that wing man, and maybe it even is at a discounted price to be able to show that it's a, you know, this great value, but then you go to the page that has all the other. You know, TVs or whatever else, when you get to that next page, then you can see the item that you really want to sell, that's actually lower than even the discounted price maybe of that big item, so it feels easier, but it might be above the model that most people would have gotten without having that high anchor on the first page.

Yeah, really fascinating because it kind of goes against a sort of logical perspective, doesn't it, of like, you don't want to put people off with a high price. They might get stick a shock and leave, but actually it's more about positioning the value. That's fascinating. Yeah. So you touched on before the different two different types of businesses.

So I think you call them quality businesses and value businesses. So do you want to talk us through those two different types and how you would approach Well, everything about them really. But I found that fascinating myself because I think when I started my agency six years ago, I thought. Without thinking it through properly, I was going to win on being value, but actually in the end I pivoted to being a quality business, but I was somewhere in a messy middle for a while and I think that was a problem.

Yeah. And that is where, you know, we've, we're a herding species, we get FOMO. So even people that say they want to be about quality, they end up. Then getting looking and seeing everyone else is running a sale So it feels like I should too or you see advice that you should end your prices You know, it should be 4.

99 instead of 500 or whatever, but that's not true for everybody So that being so a quality business is one that you are these include luxury brands But you don't have to be if you have really let's say like sustainable practices. You have extra expertise that other consultants maybe in your space don't have.

If you're using, you're making handcrafted items or, you know, they're only made in the U. S. A. or whatever the stuff is, right, that you're using that is Of this, ironically, like high value for people, even though this is a quality space. So you can still have value to what you're providing, but it's about that quality.

That is one category. Also, again, luxury. If you're catering to celebrities, things like that, you know, you've got this one aspect that you want to be a quality business. And like I said, you know, they should be rounding their prices being the five hundreds and not the four 99s or the four 97s. You also win.

So in the book, I have my it's not about the cookie framework, and there are six kind of categories that we look at social proof, the way that you're leveraging scarcity, how you use priming words to frame the way somebody's thinking about all of these things you want to do differently for a quality business than you do for value.

So the value side are those, those deals, those discounts, those bargains, the things that we Want to just get the deal, right? So these are Walmart, Costco, great brands. There's nothing wrong. It's not to say similarly that they're not quality, but they're all about that deal that they're getting. They do a lot of sales, whereas your quality brands may not do them at all, or they're very, very strategically implemented and they should be rounding down.

Their prices and looking at them in that way. So those are the two approaches. And just to talk a little bit about what happens. It's hard. It can feel difficult to choose, and it feels like You can do both, like I, but I want quality and value. I hear you. And when you don't choose is when it makes it really hard for people to buy from you because it just, something's off, right?

They can sense that something's not quite. even if they can't articulate what it is. So I have a client that I was working with years ago and they are a services firm and I'm a big advocate for asking weird or unconventional questions, which, you know, if you've ever worked with market research, Potentially seen some of these before in this case.

One of the questions we asked the staff and a sampling of customers was if XYZ company was a car, what make and model would they be and why? And they were definitely like I said, nothing to do with cars. And so in that case, you know, the owner, one of the owners of the company had said that their car is a Porsche Cayenne because they're high quality and like providing this like great customized service, whatever.

And a time and again, over and over customers said their clients, they said that they were a beat up old pickup truck because they were dependable and they're always there when you need them. Right. And like, that's. Problem, right? It's a huge disconnect, which for one thing wouldn't have come up in a would you refer us?

Are you satisfied with your services? Because the answers to those things are yes. But this is a they wanted to be about quality. At least this one owner cared about that, right? And they're putting out real value vibes in a way that just makes it You Hard to know what they're really about. So in this case, my client had to decide, do they want to double down on who they want to be?

They want to be the Porsche. And so they want to make sure that it's quality through and through, or is it time to embrace. How they're being seen be the pickup truck and love it and go all in on being a value brand. That's the choice and then making sure that the language and consistency everything ties in with whichever path you choose.

Right. And it's all about that, isn't it? It's about that consistent message so the customer can really understand it. So you touched there on how customer, you know, how you approach customer research. How does customer research play a part in pricing strategy? And what is some of the advice you would give our listeners on getting customer research right when it comes to pricing?

Yeah, so if you are able to do, I mean, even simple A B testing is a way that you can be doing some of your own research. You can, of course, hire firms that are doing very extensive search and research you know, depending on what your volumes are and what your options are. If you're doing it yourself, my suggestions for Experiments and research is a kind of a three pronged approach here.

So, one is that you need to be thoughtful about what you're looking into. You could test everything, and one thing we find from behavioral economics is really everything matters. Really little tiny things that we don't think should play in, absolutely do. So you could test all the things in the world and it would be a real waste of time and it's not going to get you the lift, you know, that you need.

So know what you're testing, why you're testing it and be focused on, on that. Think about it in advance. You also need to be small. In the things that you test. So it's really easy to feel like we're going to do a whole new everything. We'll change the subject line and we'll change, we'll use emojis on this one, but we didn't have them on the last one.

We're going to change the color and change the image and change the language and the call to action is a different color. If you change everything, you don't know what worked. and what didn't. And so that's just not helpful. So you want to do a lot of small tests where you're able to just change the headline and see what happened.

And then the next day, or however long it takes you to get a reasonable enough sample, you change what you put on the call to action, or you change the picture, or you change whatever. So, one little thing at a time, you know, keep it small, and then again, testing often. So be thoughtful, keep it small, test often.

and make sure you have a control group because if you don't have a control group, you can't know what really happened. And there's, there are so many confounding variables out there of the time of the year. If it's, you know, a time of day, if it's the weather outside, less people are shopping or they're in a better mood because it's sunny out.

These things really do impact all sorts, even if you don't think it should matter for your business. And so if you aren't running controls at the same time, you can't know what was really based on, you know, the experiment that you're running. Yeah, totally agree. You're speaking my language. One of the, one of my mantras to my clients is like test one thing at a time.

And be clear about what is the hypothesis you're testing? Like, is this based on some thought you've had or is it based on some kind of data that you've seen that suggests that this thing might make a difference? Yeah. Okay. Changing tack. So tell us about your, it's not about the cookie framework and some of the I guess they are sort of like psychological concepts that play into that framework.

Yeah, so this is and I love telling stories. So, you know in this case, you know, imagine that we're walking down the street having a great conversation and we haven't seen each other in a while. And we're just chatting and then all of a sudden there's this amazing scent that comes down the street. And while we're still talking, you know, we're more like cartoon characters now.

Our noses are, you know, guiding us as we're trying to find the source of this amazing smell. And as we get closer, we see a line and we find ourselves in the line. And then someone says, Oh, like for today only we have buy three cookies, get one free. And here's a sample. And, you know, before we know it. We walk out of there eating cookies at with an undisclosed number in a bag for later.

Right? So that is scenario one. We've all been there. That's scenario one. Scenario two, same conversation, same street, same everything. We're walking down, but then somebody comes up and, you know, shoves a coupon in our face and says, Hey, Hey, Hey today only, you know, if you buy four cookies, you only have to pay for three of them.

And I've got samples. You know, this guy, get out of here. I, you know, how rude is he? We were obviously having a good conversation. Now we're talking about bad sales experiences. And then by the time we see the line, we're pitying those people for having worse standards than us. And we smell the cookies. We are taking down their names so we can go write Yelp reviews about their bad sales practices.

We would never buy from them. So in this case. It could have been the exact same cookies in both scenario, and we didn't even get into the price, right? So the first cookies were almost definitely buying. Maybe they were three dollars a cookie. And in the second scenario we're almost definitely not, even if they were, you know, 50 cents per cookie.

So in the case of it being not about the cookie, it's not about the price. It's all the things that happened before mattered more than the price. itself. And those are the concepts of the it's not about the cookie framework. And all the same things happened really in those two scenarios, but it's showing, you know, the good and bad of them.

And it's important to start with in the space of behavioral economics, it's known as priming. But that thing that pulls you in, that thing that happens just before the decision, the scent of the cookies is really important to be at the beginning and throughout the process that's gonna make, be enticing and make your brain get excited about.

going in there. So priming is one of the aspects of that cookie framework. We've talked about a couple other ones, social proof, which was the line outside or writing reviews. We're a herding species, as I said, so that matters to us. We also have framing. So how you say something matters more than what you say.

So in the first scenario where I said, buy three, get one free. And in the other, it's Hey, if you buy four cookies, you only have to pay for three of them, which is really clunky and weird. It feels like, I don't know what I'm talking about and weirdly rhyming statements. We believe those people are smarter and more knowledgeable and thoughtful than when they don't.

And just simply saying stuff. So we also have loss aversion, scarcity reciprocity, things that were all grouped into that framework, which of course go into great detail in the book of how you can leverage them for some of them are the same throughout, but split into those quality versus value brand approaches.

So you make sure that you're using them. In the right way with your company. Right. Yeah. That makes sense. I've seen, I don't think it was in your book, but I've seen people talk about how price actually impacts how people then even feel about the product after they've bought it. So. I can't remember if it's called like, Vebbler effect or something like that.

I remember reading about it, but it's something where, so for instance, with wine, if people think the wine is expensive, then when they taste it, they think it tastes better. Have you got any examples of that or any detail on that? Yeah. So, and like you said, I actually didn't get too deep into that in the book because There's so much that you can show on this, even things like when the glass is heavier, we feel like the, the wine or some is better, you know, and it's a higher quality.

And like you said, the, the price, so there's interesting research going into even things like pain medication like an aspirin type, you know, that if you were told that in one case it was like 10 cents. per pill, and in the other case it was 2. 50 or something per pill. And they had people take them and then report if they felt pain relief or not.

And they were receiving electric shocks at the time, so it's not like nothing's going on in this set. And those who were told they were given the more expensive pill said that they felt More pain relief than those who were told it was a less expensive pill and you know as with almost everything You know, it's a placebo anyway, but the perception of how that feels makes a difference and like you said with wine, you know, if you tell somebody that this one is a 100 bottle of wine and this other one came from a box, you know, even if they're the exact same one It feels different if you have the quality of the Coffee can be exactly the same, but if it's served where it's like styrofoam cups and it was, everything's, you know, strewn about, you kind of go, ugh, this must taste terrible.

If it comes from the carafe and it looks like it was burnt or something, versus in a nice, mug, you know, it feels like it's different, even again, it's exactly the same. So that perception is reality is very true. So thinking about even just the images you use on your website, we have mirror neurons that help us to understand how we feel about different things to empathize and to learn.

So this is why unboxing videos are really important. Our senses are so important in how we feel about things. And even if I'm not the one going, Ooh, it's so nice. It's soft, right? When I see you experiencing that and there's that great lighting and you have the great words that you're able to say about how it's plush or, or whatnot, I can resonate with that in a way that it feels like it's me, that it makes it easier for me to buy and experience it down the line because of a really great image or video.

And I guess also one of the things we've seen like a big shift towards, I guess, an online advertising is user generated ads. So they're sort of created by people that seem like real people. I guess that's an example of hurting because if it's like someone like me, that's buying this product, then it must be good versus.

just telling me I should buy something. Yeah, that's a social proof, which works because of that herding aspect. And so, and also, you know, we feel like those people, even if it's, you know, actor, it's just like actor portrayal or that, you know, this person was compensated for their sharing their real story or whatnot.

When we are able to see those and that person was experiencing the same problem I was experiencing and it, you can tell it's. Someone talking about it or sharing that content versus what feels like a very polished and obvious app. When it's like us talking about how good, great it is, is very different than a real person talking about it.

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. sO you get at the end of the book, you give some quite good tactical advice around things like visual cues to make a pricing smaller decimals and commas, what number, you know, what number to end your price in. I know sometimes that advice, if it's taken in black and white and not applied, you know, to the right business in the right way, it's, it's not very valuable, but do you want to talk us through some of, some of your research and learning around that, those ideas?

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So. Things like the font size you were talking about we tend to feel like if something is the sale price that we want to make it really big, you know, and then the was price might be really small, but because our brains make very literal associations all the time, even something as simple as small number, small price, we can be making those tie ins together in a big number feels like a big price.

So often saying it's 70 percent off is really big because we want you to feel like, Whoa, it's a big discount. And the price itself, you may want to have be a little bit smaller. So playing around with having the sale price be. Smaller so that you can, you know, see that then the old price that you're going to cross out can help it to feel even smaller when you're doing it in that way.

So that's one sort of tactic that goes, it's kind of counter to what we see. We feel like we see a lot and then that hurting instinct is like, well, I guess this is how we do it. This is the wrong way. Right. Yeah, exactly. So we don't want to necessarily do that. And again, test, right? So for your brand, you may find that that really big, if you're a value brand and you've got a really great, that your discount is actually, or your regular price is lower than what someone else is doing and you have it really obvious.

I talk about Ryanair and a case study in the book and flights. Here in the States are really expensive, no matter where you're going, it feels like. And I was in London and got a flight on Ryanair to go visit a friend in Ireland. And I was worried about how much it was going to be and it was 17 pounds each way.

Which, you know, so, you know, equated, you know, with the conversion at the time it was like 35 round trip to go visit my friend. It was more expensive to take the cab, you know, or whatever, to get to the airport. So it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a hard thing to do. than, than it was to fly up there. And so seeing that number because everyone else's prices are so high, it's, it's great even if it is, you know, you want to call attention to it.

So again, test and be thoughtful to that what you want someone to, to do. So then when you're asking about decimals. Percent or the the commas, my goodness, why am I missing that word? Those, I just almost across the board, especially if you, if you don't want your number to feel high, which even for a lot of quality brands, you potentially don't want it to feel like, wow, that's really expensive.

There are some cases where. They do want that. You know, some luxury brands, the price is the whole point, right? There's to show you can afford it. But in general, a lot of companies don't want to draw attention to that. So just take the sense out of it, remove that decimal point, you can round up, that's fine, it still feels smaller, and I show in the book as we go through a process of removing the decimal point, removing the comma, again a comma makes the number feel bigger than, you know, when it's not there, and there's also research in showing that we feel more pain of paying and research shows, again, we feel physical, like physical pain in the same way when we're experiencing pain in buying for things, but removing a dollar sign or whatever your currency is makes it to where it doesn't hit the same way in the brain to feel that pain of paying.

And so you may notice, you know, if you go to A restaurant, they, a lot of them now don't have dollar signs on wine, like we were talking about wine on there. And that is very intentional because of that pain of paying, it doesn't hit us in the same, same way. So yeah, little things can make a really big difference.

Yeah, I love it. I can think of stuff straight away that I want to test with our clients. So that's awesome. Okay, that's all we've got time for today. But where can our readers get their hands on this amazing new book of yours and how can they find you and follow you? Oh, thank you so much. So all the information about All, all of me, I guess you can find@thebrainybusiness.com, including all of my books and the podcast and, and everything.

So the brainy business.com has all of that. You can find me on the socials as the brainy biz BIZ, and as Molina Palmer on LinkedIn. 

For your listeners, we do have a special URL you can go to. It's thebrainybusiness. com slash Jessie. And you can get a chapter of any of my books for free. You can check out, see if it's a fit for you, you know, the try before you buy sort of a situation there. So you can all go and get that at thebrainybusiness. 

com slash Jessie.

Awesome. And yeah, quick plug for your awesome podcast, which is where, how I came across you. So everyone should go and give that one a follow and a subscribe. Awesome.

Great to see you. And we'll chat to you again soon.