why people decide if you’re expensive before they read your pricing
People decide what you cost before they see a number. By the time someone reaches your pricing page, they are not evaluating your price. They are comparing it against a guess they already made, and that guess was built from everything they saw on the way there.
This is why the price conversation can sometimes feel unwinnable. You explain the value. You break down what is included. You point to results. None of it moves, because you are arguing against a number that was set before you opened your mouth.
Here is where that number comes from.
The first number wins, even when it is nonsense
In 1974, two psychologists ran an experiment that has been repeated ever since. They spun a wheel marked from zero to one hundred, rigged to land on either ten or sixty five, then asked people to estimate what percentage of United Nations member countries were African. The wheel had nothing to do with the question. Everyone could see that.
It did not matter. The group who saw ten guessed around twenty five percent. The group who saw sixty five guessed around forty five percent. A random number, visibly random, pulled the answers toward itself.
That is anchoring. When someone has to estimate a value they cannot calculate, they grab whatever starting point is nearby and adjust from there. The adjustment is almost always too small.
Your prospect cannot calculate what your work is worth. They have never bought it before, or they bought it once from someone else, and they have no way to compute a fair number. So they do what everyone does. They start from something.
The anchor does not have to be a number
Most writing about anchoring assumes there is a price on the table. A crossed out list price. A competitor quote. A number in the room.
But researchers have spent decades studying a second kind of anchor, the kind people generate themselves. Somebody trying to estimate an unfamiliar quantity starts from a related fact they already know and works outward from it. And that adjustment stops early. It stops as soon as the answer feels plausible, not when it becomes accurate.
Apply that to your business. Nobody hands your prospect a starting number. So they build one. They assemble it out of whatever evidence is sitting in front of them, and then they adjust just far enough to feel done.
Which raises the only question that matters here. What are they building it out of?
They build it out of what they can see
There is a large body of research on how people decide whether a business is credible online, and the finding that keeps surfacing is unglamorous. They look at it.
In one Stanford study, more than 2,600 people evaluated live websites and wrote down why they trusted or distrusted each one. The single most common thing they mentioned was how the site looked. Not the credentials. Not the claims. The look, cited in roughly 46 percent of comments, ahead of how information was organized and what the site actually said.
The effect was strongest in exactly the categories where the stakes are highest and the service is hardest to evaluate in advance. Finance sites drew visual comments more than half the time.
Read that again with your own business in the frame. The harder your work is to judge from the outside, the more weight people put on how you present it. Not because they are shallow. Because it is the only evidence they have been given.
So the anchor gets built from your website, your photos, your proposal, the fonts, the spacing, the images of you. Then your price arrives and gets measured against it.
Why explaining yourself afterward does not work
Here is the part that stings. You would think that warning people about anchoring would fix it. Researchers have tested this repeatedly. A recent replication effort with more than 650 participants found the anchoring effect robust and found no evidence that forewarning people reduced it.
Telling someone not to be anchored does not un-anchor them.Which means the standard playbook fails by design. Adding a paragraph about your process. Listing what makes you different. Explaining, patiently, why the number is fair. All of that arrives after the anchor is set, and the adjustment away from an anchor is reliably too small.
You cannot argue someone out of a number. You can only give them a better one to start from.
Two objections that look identical and are not
Both of these sound the same on a call. They are different problems.
“That’s more than I expected.” This is an anchoring problem. They had a number in their head and yours came in above it. They can afford you. Their expectation was set by the evidence you gave them, and the evidence was pointing lower than your price.
“That’s more than I can spend.” This is a budget problem. Their number and your number are both real and they do not overlap. Nothing about your presentation changes that.
Track which one you hear. If most of your nos are the first kind, the price is not the issue and discounting will not help. You have an evidence problem, and it is a version of the reputation gap: your business has moved, and the signals people use to price you have not moved with it.
The evidence problem is fixable, and it is mostly visual
If the anchor is built from what people can see before they reach your price, then the work is upstream of the price. It happens on the pages they land on first.
Here’s Where I come in
That is where brand photography does something a paragraph of copy cannot. Not because photos are magic, but because they are the highest-prominence thing on most pages, and prominence is what gets used. A set of images that shows a business operating at the level you actually operate at raises the starting number before your price ever enters the conversation. The failure mode is generic imagery. Stock, or a headshot from a different era of your business, or a set that could belong to anyone in your field. That does not fail to set an anchor. It sets a low one.
This is also why the shoot has to start with a strategy conversation rather than a camera. An Alignment Session exists to answer one question first: what does your work need to look like it costs? Everything after that is production.
The one thing to take away
Your price is not the first number in the conversation. It is the second.
Go look at your own site the way a stranger would, and ask what number it suggests. If the answer is lower than what you charge, you already know what to fix, and it is not the pricing page.
FAQ
Why do people think I’m expensive when my prices are in line with my market? Because they are not comparing you to your market. They are comparing you to the number they formed before they saw your price, and that number came from your website, your images, and your materials rather than from competitor research.
Should I put my prices on my website? I use a starting price my site. It can help, but it will not solve this. Transparent pricing helps people self-select and it builds trust. It does not change what anchor they arrive at the price with. Both things need to be handled.
Will lowering my price fix a “you’re too expensive” objection? Only if the objection is about budget. If the objection is about expectation, lowering the price confirms the low anchor and makes the next increase harder.
How long does it take to change how people price you? Faster than most people think, because it is a presentation change rather than a reputation change. The signals can be updated in weeks. The old ones stop working the moment they are replaced.
SOURCES
- Tversky, A., and Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Science, 185(4157), 1124 to 1131. The wheel of fortune experiment and the original description of anchoring and adjustment.
- Epley, N., and Gilovich, T. (2001). Putting Adjustment Back in the Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic. Psychological Science, 12(5), 391 to 396. Self-generated anchors.
- Epley, N., and Gilovich, T. (2006). The Anchoring-and-Adjustment Heuristic: Why the Adjustments Are Insufficient. Psychological Science, 17(4), 311 to 318. Adjustment stops at the first plausible value.
- Fogg, B.J., Soohoo, C., Danielson, D., Marable, L., Stanford, J., and Tauber, E. (2003). How Do Users Evaluate the Credibility of Web Sites? Proceedings of DUX ’03. 2,684 participants; design look present in 46.1 percent of credibility comments.
- Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, Web Credibility Project. Category breakdown of design-related credibility comments, including finance at 54.6 percent.
- Röseler, L., et al. (2024). Need for Cognition, Cognitive Load, and Forewarning do not Moderate Anchoring Effects. Replication of Epley and Gilovich, N = 657.
- Ariely, D., Loewenstein, G., and Prelec, D. (2003). Coherent Arbitrariness. Arbitrary initial values shaping willingness to pay.
