I have been a huge fan of Malcolm Gladwell ever since I read his book The Tipping Point. Recently I saw him give a TED Talk, where he talked about Dr. Howard Moskowitz and his theory of Horizontal Segmentation. The message of the TED Talk has some valuable lessons for small business owners looking for a profitable uncontested Blue Ocean market that the competition has not yet discovered or exploited.

A common belief in product development born out of the day of mass markets prior to the long tail economy, was that as a product developer, your goal was to find the largest and most profitable segment and go all in.

Product developers would come up with a few versions or configurations, and then convene a focus group to discover which version represented the single best option. Frequently competitors followed the same product development proecess and developed similar competing brands with almost the same attributes. The business would define the final product configuration and put its full marketing weight behind it. In the end, businesses would fight over a single large slice and often ignore the smaller slices.

Dr. Howard Moskowitz’s contribution to the field of modern marketing was his theory of Horizontal Segmentation. The theory says there should not be just one version of a product, but many niche versions.

The theory came from an epiphany Dr. Moskowitz had when working for Prego. Back in the 1980’s Ragu and Prego, each produced one version of pasta sauce. Prego, which by all accounts was a better tasting sauce, was losing the marketing war with Ragu, the gold standard of pasta sauces in the day.

Prego made a decision to hire Dr. Moskowitz to help them understand why they were unable to challenge the market leader Ragu.

He asked the product developers at Prego to come up with 45 different varieties of pasta sauce. Some sweeter, some with more garlic, some more tart, others more sour, etc. He then set out to test which version people liked most. This was the typical approach of the day. However, Dr, Moskowitz had a degree in both psychology and mathematics, and was a real number cruncher. When he analyzed the results of the taste tests, he could make little sense of the data. Preferences were all over the board- and there was no clear winner.

What rooted many people in the food industry particularly was finding the universal truth and remaining true to history. Pasta sauces came from Italy where traditionally pasta sauce was pureed to make them smooth. One of the variations he had the Prego product developers make was not pureed, but was chunky instead. Many of the subjects liked it even though it didn’t conform to the pasta sauce tradition of being smooth.

He began to consider the concept of Inter-market Variability, and asked the following question – “why only have one version of a product?” From here, he devised his theory of horizontal segmentation.

He advised Prego to not have just one type of pasta sauce but to have several varieties. They continued to offer the traditional version but they added Chunky Garden, Zesty, Roasted Garlic & Herb, Fresh Mushroom and several more varieties. With Dr. Moskowitz’s help, Prego found a whole new bunch of uncontested blue ocean horizontal markets for pasta sauce. The chunky version alone made six hundred million dollars for Prego before the competition caught on,

When it comes to marketing, there are two primary ways to describe your offering.  One way focuses on what your offering does, known as its features. The other is how it will improve your user or prospect’s life, known as its benefits. 

As described in the article “The Most Obvious Marketing Mistake – Selling on Features“, many nascent business owners spend too much time listing features such as all the bells and whistles when they interact with their potential customers, and not enough time trying to connect the features to the benefits which is the part that the prospect really needs to understand.  Left to their own accord, users and prospects often fail to make the proper correlation between the features and the benefits.  Good marketers don’t leave benefits to chance and make a concerted effort to make the connections for the potential customer.

Features

Features describe the attributes of a product. For example, Oculus Go is a headset that the user wears.  When they describe the high-resolution display, tracking features of the device, or the size of its memory, they are talking about its features. 

What I see in a lot of marketing material for Business to Business companies are data and fact sheets that list all the features.  That is because many Business to Business companies are sales-led organizations, and as such the marketing material they produce is used primarily as support for a salesperson’s pitch which reveals the benefits. 

Benefits

Benefits describe what a user or prospect will gain by using the product or service. While the features describe the “what”, the benefits describe the “why”.  By connecting a feature to its benefits, it connects the features to a person’s desires. 

In the Oculus example, one of their ads said:

“Oculus enables the sensation of presence and the magic of presence changes everything.” 

The “sensation of presence” is more of a feature and the “presence changes everything” connects it to the benefit.

The benefit answers the age-old question “So what?” in the user or prospect’s mind after they see a list of features.

It is always advisable for a business to have a unique value proposition or something that makes them different from the competition. 

For example, if you are a dry cleaner you don’t need to describe the benefit for each of your features. However, if your blue ocean feature is that you provide a home pick up and delivery service, you had better make that benefit abundantly clear. You could show how it will save the customer valuable time and aggravation dropping off and picking up their clothes so they can spend that time more productively, such as at their child’s after-school event. 

When you have something that makes your business unique, don’t expect the customer to simply look at your features such as your pick up and delivery service, and make the leap to how this will benefit them, you must show them.

Infomercials, like the classic Shamwow infomercial are an example of how structure and technique can have a huge effect on how a user or prospect is driven toward taking a specific action like clicking a buy button.

Infomercials follow a specific structure that any small business can use to drive action but few businesses ever consider using it when they pitch their product or service. In this post, we’ll describe the structure and give you examples of how you can use it in your business

The infomercial structure is effective because at each step, the prospect is taking small, incremental steps towards your solution. These steps are rooted in both universal truths and emotion. Marketers can learn from the structure and techniques used by infomercials when they design their marketing materials. Whether you are writing copy for a landing page, developing a sales presentation, or creating an ad, the structure and techniques used in infomercials can help you achieve greater conversion rates.

The process involves drawing the prospect in, establishing a level of trust, removing any doubts, and convincing them that the time to buy is now. The process can be broken down into five steps.

1. Explain The Universal Problem

The process starts with knowing your user or prospect. Once you know your customer you should be able to understand their needs and problems.

In this step, you need to alert the user or prospect to a common problem by Illustrating the pain associated with their current state.

Marketers often use images or video where appropriate that exaggerates the problem, such as a ladder balancing precariously on an uneven surface, a person grabbing their back and grimacing in pain, etc.

“Are you losing business because when you are on a sales call, you don’t have the key customer or product information you need in the moment?”

2. Share The Ideal Solution

In this step, outline the aspirations or desires of a perfect future. Does your user or prospect want to become rich, beautiful, happier, save time, etc?

“Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a solution where your mobile device could access your back-office database, so you can always have access to customer and product information from anywhere?”

In this step, you want the user or prospect to be able to acknowledge and relate to the problem and solution. Often after the problem is clearly presented, it is very clear even without stating the obvious what the ideal solution would look like.

3. Explain Why The Ideal Solution Is Hard To Achieve Or Is Undesirable

In this step, highlight the risk or uncertainty associated with the solution framing the need for a better solution. Does it cost too much? Will it take too much time?

“Creating a custom app to connect your mobile device to your back-office data is difficult, time-consuming, and expensive?

4. Explain How What You Offer Is A Pivot And Better

In this step explain the benefits of using your product or services by suggesting a simpler alternative solution to mitigate or circumvent the risk or uncertainty described in step 3.

“The good news is that we have an amazing mobile app that allows even non-technical user to connect their back-end database at a fraction of the cost and time of making your own.”

At this point, you want to present plenty of social proof such as before and after ima...

Back in the old days, there was hardware and software. Software programs were packaged in a slipcover and sold with the computer hardware, or sold separately to customers. Software was a physical product that the customer purchased up front and then owned in perpetuity.

As the internet matured, web pages took on the functionality of many software products. These software applications lived in the cloud and didn’t require physical ownership. Moreover, customers no longer had to pay for periodic upgrades since the online applications lived on a server and not on their hardware platforms. Software as a Service companies, known by the acronym SaaS became a business model. Based on their online delivery strategy, SaaS companies were presented with new revenue model opportunities.

Initially, SaaS products were monetized with a subscription model. The user paid an annual, monthly or lifetime subscription and was provided a login to access the application. SaaS marketers were always looking for new go-to-market strategies and rather than use the more ubiquitous sales-led or market-led approach, many SaaS companies chose instead to experiment with a product-led approach.

With a product-led approach, instead of just telling the prospect what they would get with their product, they offered the user a free trial period so they could create their own “Aha” moments by actually using the full-version application during the trial period.

While the free trial strategy was effective at converting some customers based on the endowment effect and loss aversion caused by the impending end of the free trial period, it did cut the other way too. Knowing that it would take time to configure the new application to make it work properly and integrate it with other business systems, the prospect’s fear of not having adequate time to configure and test the application before the trial period expired created some friction in the application’s adoption. To solve this problem, the freemium model was born.

Freemium users get basic functionality free forever rather than just for a limited time like a free trial. However, to improve the user experience there is an upgrade path that comes with a cost.

The economics of freemium is that a few paying users, who buy the full-featured version, help subsidize the users of the free version. With a freemium model, the business blends the free basic services used by the masses with a paid premium or pro version. As a general rule only about ten percent of users choose to get unlimited access or additional features offered in the pro version. Therefore, the job of marketers that offer a freemium product is to transition more free users into paying customers.

With a freemium product, the business still has to spend marketing dollars to get users to sign-up for the freemium version and may even need to provide sales support. However, rather than spend money on sales commissions as with a sales-led or on paid ads to explain the value of the application in a market-led approach, the use of a product-led approach allowed the company to spend more time and money developing the product.

Freemium products leverage consumer psychology. The Endowment effect says that we value things more if we own them. Having access to a freemium product increases the sense of ownership and therefore increases the perceived value of the product.

A small business has three basic strategies to drive revenue. They can be sales-led, market-led, or product-led.

However, before we dive in, I once saw a great definition of sales vs marketing that can help make the points discussed in this post clearer.

* Marketing is an effort defined by the business to communicate to the masses. (One on Many)

* Sales, by contrast, is a sales rep from the company communicating with a prospect in a face-to-face fashion. (One on One)

But where does product-led fit in? Not sure what they mean? This post endeavors to define the answers.

Sales-Led

Most Business to Business or B2B companies employ a sales-led approach based on the fact that most sales are complex sales. Sales-led businesses employ sales reps who pick up the phones and make cold calls to fill the sales pipeline. Being sales-led is a person on person approach where the salesperson can tailor their sales pitch based on the customer’s unique situation and position in the company and the salesperson is provided the latitude to construct a unique solution for each customer and situation.

Moreover, many small businesses tend to be sales-led since their business lacks much brand awareness or collateral material and requires a more personal touch in selling to fill in the gaps. Marketing efforts in a sales-led organization act more in a support rather than a lead role.

Sales-led companies spend the vast amount of their effort creating sales collateral such as data sheets. They participate in industry events as a way to generate sales leads. Every lead is worth pursuing in a sales-led organization, as very few lead qualification strategies are employed. Sales-led organizations frequently use pressure-based email marketing tactics, and the main metric used to assess performance is getting the sale.

Market-Led

Many Business to Consumer or B2C companies employ a market-led approach. Market-led organizations use content to create leads and use systems, often automated, to shepherd a prospect through the buyer’s journey.

Marketing collateral is made up of papers and eBooks to educate the prospect and helps to establish the credibility of the business as a thought leader in their industry. The content produced by market-led companies use strong calls to actions to move prospects through the sales funnel.

Since there is less reliance on a person on person sales rep to close deals, marketing efforts include ways to nurture and qualify the leads as they progress down the sales funnel. Multiple pathways exist for a lead to travel through the sales funnel based on their pain points and personas. Most sales are closed without the need for a sales rep. If a sales rep is required to make the final sale, rest assured only the most qualified leads make it to sales.

Product-Led

Most Software as a Service or SaaS companies employ a product-led approach. Product-led organizations use a bottom-up approach to make sales. Instead of trying to educate the customer or just telling them what they would get if they bought the product, product-led companies offered the user access to the product so they could create their own “Aha” moments by actually using it.

Product-led strategies rely heavily on network effects in the hopes that their usage will make the product go viral.

Related Post: THE SECRET TO A VIRAL PRODUCT OR SERVICE

The design of a product-led strategy starts with focusing on users rather than buyers and targets the pain the user experiences and provides an immediate solution to address the pain.

Often product-led organizations employ free trials or Freemium versions to get the product in a prospect’s hands at no initial cost to remove the friction of price and trust before making a sale.

What if you could create additional value for your product or service in the mind of your customer that would cost you nothing — would you be interested? Well you can, and it is easy when you understand how to use Consumption Vocabulary.

A good description can convey your knowledge, build trust with the consumer, and set their expectations so that they will appreciate and value your offering more.

Create Value

Have you ever heard a sommelier describe a bottle of wine?

“Fissore’s wines have exceptional balance and purity of fruit. The Bricco Pernice Barolo comes from a specific vineyard plot within the lauded, long-aging Ravera cru. It’s elegant, silky, powerful, and refined, with bright red fruit, soft tannins, and a thin line of acidity that will preserve this cuvée for decades to come. It’s the kind of bottle that embodies traditional Nebbiolo, yet defies the Barolo region’s tannic, angular, unapproachable stereotypes.”

The above is an actual description of a bottle of wine. I don’t know about you, but I really don’t have any idea what half the words in the descriptions mean and neither do a lot of people. However, the take away is that the wine must be something very special. This is because when it comes to creating value, marketers can use luxurious and flowery terms, lengthy descriptions, and even made-up words because people believe in the magic of language.

Economist called the use of specific terms to describe an experience as “Consumption Vocabulary”.

In another example of Consumption Vocabulary consider Starbucks. Rather than use small medium and large to describe their coffee sizes, they use Short, Tall, Grande, Venti, and Trenta. Coffees are not described as regular or decaffeinated but instead are labeled as Latte, Cappuccino, Macchiato, Americano, Cordusio, and the list goes on. The use of luxurious and uncommon words trigger greater value in the mind of the consumer.  It is this use of Consumption Vocabulary that allows Starbucks to charge more for their products than McDonald even though in blind taste tests consumers rate McDonald’s coffee as better tasting.

Consumption Vocabulary is a trick often used in fine restaurants to justify a higher perceived value on their product. Let’s consider a Consumption Vocabulary with respect to a cheeseburger with lettuce and tomatoes. A tavern or pub may list the burger on their menu simply a cheeseburger. However, a description used to describe a cheeseburger in a fine restaurant might read something like the following

“Artisanal goat fromage graces our hand-crafted grass-feed bovine composite, served on our homemade bruschetta bun, topped with heirloom vine-ripened tomatoes, curated greens, and our special reserve spice blend parsed for variances by expertologists.”

The tavern burger’s description might justify a $5 price, while the latter description might command $20 or more.

Create Trust

In addition to customer perception and the attribution of higher value to a product or service, the language used in a description can convey a person’s knowledge and build trust between the brand and the consumer.

As a bourbon drinker, I did a bourbon tour one year on vacation and tried to visit every bourbon distillery in Kentucky. In the tasting room, the bourbon host’s description used specific terms like “bouquet” or “legs” to describe their whiskeys. The use of exclusive vocabulary makes a person appear to be very knowledgeable about their product. This perceived knowledge breeds trust with the consumer.

While it’s often good advice to translate technical terms for a user, the use of technical terms also has a component of adding value because when people use technical terms that the consumer does not necessarily understand, it’s clear that the person using the words has ...

In most cases in life, you can either make more of something or be more efficient with how you use something. For example, you can earn more money if you don’t have enough to make you happy or you can be more efficient with how you spend it. You can buy more food if you are hungry or use it more wisely. However, there is one thing that you can’t make more of and that is time. No matter how hard you try or how much you spend, you can’t make more time — you can only try to be more efficient with it.

Over the past few months, my mom has been in and out of the hospital. It became clear after three hospital stays in as many months that she could no longer live independently, so we moved her from her independent living facility to an assisted living facility. Biased towards family obligations of making almost daily runs to the hospital, an hour each way, and helping her move, I have felt a bit out of control when it came to keeping up with my business obligations.

It is funny how when you have some stress in your life, that a solution can sometimes present itself in strange ways. Well, that is how I happened upon a new process of recording my To-Do list that has helped me cope with my recent time pressures.

I have always maintained some type of To-Do list. Typically, I’d scan the list of tasks that need to be done, and find a few tasks that I could accomplish in the time slots I had available. This process worked alright when there was ample time to accomplish all the tasks on my To-Do list each week. Unfortunately, when the list kept getting longer and the time available to address them getting pinched, I’d often wake up in the middle of the night realizing that a critical task was approaching, to which I’d lay in bed and mentally struggle with rearranging priorities losing a lot of sleep.

Then I discovered this free online two-dimensional Priority Matrix board to replace my old ToDo list that helped me get my tasks better organized.

Once you set up your free account you can create what they call the Priority Matrix on Realtime Board’s cloud platform.  I set mine up using my desktop computer.  I then saved the URL and pinned it to my bookmark bar folder that appears in the banner of my browser so I can access it with one click from my browser. There is even an app in the App Store and Google Play so you can view and update your Priority Matrix ToDo list from a mobile device.

Once set up I then place my ToDo tasks in the proper location on the Priority Matrix board based on their importance and urgency. Rather than choosing the tasks to perform based on the time I have available, which often caused me to perform shorter and easier tasks over longer and harder ones, I’m focused on accomplishing important tasks that are more urgent in nature first before I tackle any of the other tasks on my list.

Important and Urgent refers to tasks that need to be done and have a critical time element that is drawing near. If ignored, these tasks will cause you pain.

Important and Not-Urgent refers to tasks that need to be done however they can be pushed off so that you can address more urgent ones. Often tasks migrate from important/non-urgent to important/urgent as their due dates approach.

Not-Important and Urgent refers to tasks that have a sense of urgency as a window is closing but if push came to shove, they could be ignored.

Note: Assuming that all the Important and Urgent tasks are completed, you might prioritize what task from either the Important and Not-Urgent and Not-Important and Urgent tasks hold the highest priority.

Not-important and Not-Urgent refers to tasks that may need to be done, but are not part of any critical path nor are they time sensitive in accomplishing.

For example, I may have a task to write up a new blog post like this ...

In June 2018 the US supreme court upheld a lower court’s ruling that the state of South Dakota could force the online retailer Wayfair, a retailer with no nexus, which is a physical location, in the state to collect sales taxes. This ruling sent shockwaves through the eCommerce community.

Prior to the court’s ruling, most eCommerce retailers only had to have a sales tax license and collect sales taxes for all jurisdictions for a single location. Based on the location where the buyer took possession of goods, the seller only had to collect sales taxes for the taxing jurisdictions that the seller and the buyer had in common. That all changed, as many states have used the supreme court’s ruling to impose their own requirements on internet sellers to collect sales taxes.

Here is what you need to know as an online retailer.

The supreme court’s decision included seven guidelines for compliance and constitutionality. While recommended by the court, each state was free to define which guidelines to implement and what values to apply. The seven guidelines provided by the supreme court are as follows.

1. Safe Harbor

In the case of South Dakota, it exempted businesses with less than $100,000 in sales or less than 200 transactions at the state level from collecting sales tax if the business didn’t have a nexus in the state. Therefore, if an online seller sold only a keychain online for $1.00, $200 in total sales in the state would trigger the need to get a sales tax license and begin collecting of sales taxes. While the $100k sales or 200 transactions safe harbor thresholds was the case with South Dakota, each state can set their own minimum limits. Moreover, the definition of what amounted to a transaction was not clear. If you bought two items from an online retailer in a single sale, was it one transaction or two since there were two items?

2. No Retroactive Collection

The states cannot force a business to pay sales taxes on sales made prior to the state’s implementation of the new sales tax collections rules or on sales made prior to the period where sales tax collection obligations began.

3. Single State Level Administration Of All State Taxes

Since there are many taxing jurisdictions (state, counties, cities, and special taxing jurisdictions) in a state, the court recommended there be only one application process and one point of sales tax remittance. At issue is what we in Colorado call home rule cities. Home rule cities are cities that were established prior to Colorado becoming a state. As such, the state does not collect sales tax from home rule cities. Retailers have to apply for, collect and remit sales taxes separately to each of these jurisdictions. Moreover, it is not clear what safe harbor thresholds apply to these individual jurisdictions.

4. Uniform Definitions Of Products And Services

States are encouraged to come up with a uniform definition of what is taxable. For example, some states tax some services and not others. In Wisconsin, where I used to have a documentation and training office, they taxed video production services but not technical writing services. Another example is taxing off-the-shelf software and not custom developed software.

5. Simplified Rate Structure

Each state defines tax jurisdictions differently. Some states like Massachusetts have one sales tax jurisdiction while Texas has 1,515 different sales tax jurisdictions.

6. Software For Access To Rates And Administration

A single place where a retailer can go and enter a buyer’s address to determine all the taxing jurisdictions and rates that apply. TaxJar offers a free Sales Tax Calculator as well as low-cost sales tax automation tools.

7.

Have you ever noticed that people prefer to own something, rather than rent it even when it makes way more sense to rent than to own? There is a simple reason for this it and it has to do more with when you pay rather than how much you pay.

Did you know that paying for something is painful literally? fMRI studies have shown that when a person has to pay for something, the same regions of the brain that light up when a person experiences pain also light up when they are paying for something.

What if customer satisfaction can actually be increased simply by separating the pain of paying with consumption.

For example, consider the alternative of building/buying a vacation property compared to staying in a luxury hotel. The expenses associated with owning a vacation home are considered differently from using the same money to pay for a luxury vacation. The mortgage, taxes, and insurance (PITI) as well as ongoing operating expenses, such as utilities and maintenance on even a relatively inexpensive/modest vacation property will exceed $12k per year. Making $1k per month PITI and periodic operating expense payments on a vacation property separates the payments from the consumption. When you finally spend time at your vacation property it is considered free so satisfaction is high.

However, consider the alternative. For that same $12k per year, you could take several fabulous vacations, more if you booked your stays using Airbnb. In this latter example, shelling out $12k at the point of consumption would not make it feel like it was a free vacation and it would feel much more painful. Therefore, your satisfaction is tarnished by the pain of payment.

What if I told you that there were a few pricing hacks that can actually increase a customer’s satisfaction? Simply by separating consumption from the payment, you can increase satisfaction. As a consumer, you can prepay, pay at the time of consumptions, or pay after consumption.

Pre-payments are like getting a gift card or buying an all-inclusive vacation package. Since the buyer pays in advance, the buyer is separated from their money before they experience what they purchased. Anticipation mitigates some of the pain felt by paying up front, but at the point of consumption there is zero pain which increases customer satisfaction.

Payment at consumption is when you pay with cash at the point of consumption. While it has the benefit of instant gratification because payment is directly coupled with consumption, the pain of payment detracts from customer satisfaction.

Payments after consumption are where the customer uses a credit card to pay. The consumer gets instant gratification from the purchase and defers the pain until the credit card bill arrives. Therefore, customer satisfaction is increased since the pain of payment is detached from consumption.

In fact, payments after consumption have some added benefits. Credit cards aggregate many monthly expenses and make people only pay once for all their purchases. So, a $1,000 per month credit card bill is far less painful to pay than making ten individual $100 payments. Therefore, consumers are willing to spend more, provide bigger tips, and overall make more careless money buying decisions when using a credit card since the individual item’s amount is small in comparison to the total credit card bill and the payment made in the future. This makes the payment associated with consumption very vague.

How can you use your knowledge of separating payment from consumption to increase your customer’s satisfaction?

Not too long ago, discounts were not as common as they are today. I remember reliably knowing that I could buy a snowblower at a discount in the spring, and lawn equipment at a discount in the fall. Retailers priced their products based on their direct and indirect costs, plus a reasonable profit margin. They only offered discounts as clearance sales at the end of the season to offload unsold merchandise rather than store them until the following year.

That is not true anymore. Spawned out of the last recession, consumers have been conditioned to focus more on what they are spending than on what they are buying.

Retailers understand the consumer’s expectations for periodic discounts and have adjusted their pricing policies to offer more discounts throughout the season rather than at the end of the season only. Consumers are no longer content to wait for an end of season sale anymore.

Today retailers go into a season knowing that they will be offering discounts generally between 20% and 40%, yet even with these steep discounts, their sale price allows them to make them a profit. This means that the original sticker price of a product is priced well above what they expect a consumer to pay for it. They know that when they offer a discount it will be like chum in the water and consumers will turn into mindless zombies and buy, buy, buy.

By using price manipulation, retailers have created a rationalization to buy. Through the practice of discounting, buyers have been convinced to value the wrong thing – price alone.

Shoppers have been convinced to focus on what they are spending for an item and not on what they are buying. Consumers buy things today not because they need them, but because they were convinced that they can get it for a great price.

Related: HOW TO GROW PROFIT & SATISFACTION WITH PRICING

Moreover, consumers are less objective about their purchases when they feel they are getting a bargain. Customers are more apt to be happy with the discount they received and tell their friends about the awesome deal they got then to brag about the actual thing they bought.

Growing up if you asked someone about a recent purchase, they would describe every detail for the product. Today when I talk to my wife or my kids about a recent purchase, they share that they could not pass up the bargain. The often neglect to even describe the product they bought and only share that they got an awesome deal. In fact, my house is full of objects bought on discount that are still in their original box. Does this sound familiar? I know that I’m not alone in this.

Instead of valuing the underlining product, consumers today thrive on the thrill of the hunt. Consumers get a burst of adrenaline when they secure a great bargain.

Just like a junkie, the high soon fades and they are in need of another fix. Shopping has become a sport.

A bargain strikes an emotional chord that few other sales tactics do anymore. Buying something useful that makes your life more enjoyable and comfortable should be the goal of making a purchase. However, bargain pricing has robbed people for choosing products that they need or love in exchange for the feeling that the purchase gives them.

As a business owner, it is essential that you understand that the buying landscape has changed. Today buyers respond to discounts more than other tactics. Therefore as a business owner and seller, you will need to price your product or services high and offer everyone some kind of discount to tap into their emotional need to find a bargain.

Are you pricing your products and services so that you can offer buyers a discount, and tap into their emotional need for a bargain?