why people decide if you’re expensive before they read your pricing
week 1 | series 1: the reputation gap |
You send somebody your website and then you sit there and wait. Somewhere in that gap, before they’ve scrolled anywhere near your pricing page, before they’ve read one word about what you actually do, they’ve already landed on a number.
Your price isn’t the first number in that conversation. It’s the second, and it’s getting compared to one you never saw.
It’s why the price conversation can feel so unwinnable sometimes. You explain the value. You walk them through what’s included. You point at results. And none of it moves, because you’re arguing with a number that got set before you opened your mouth.
You do this too, by the way. You pull up to a house event, and you set the range before you’re out of the car. Nobody told you. You just looked at the street, the roof, the neighbor’s landscaping, and your brain quietly filed it somewhere between this and that. Then the listing agent hands you the sheet and you’re not really reading the number. You’re checking it against the one you already made up.
the first number wins even when it’s nonsense
Back in 1974 two psychologists ran a study that people have been repeating ever since. They spun a wheel of fortune marked zero to a hundred, except it was rigged to only land on ten or sixty five. Then they asked people an unrelated question about how many United Nations member countries were African.
The wheel had nothing to do with anything. Everybody could see it was a wheel.
Didn’t matter. The people who watched it land on ten guessed around twenty five percent. The ones who saw sixty five guessed around forty five. A visibly random number dragged the answers toward itself.
That’s anchoring. When you have to estimate something you can’t actually calculate, you grab whatever’s nearby and adjust from there, and the adjustment is basically always too small.
Your prospect can’t calculate what your work is worth. They’ve never bought it, or they bought it once from somebody else five years ago and it went badly. There’s no math available to them. So they do what all of us do. They start from something.
the anchor doesn’t have to be a number
Most of what gets written about anchoring assumes there’s a price sitting on the table already. A crossed out list price. A competitor’s quote. Something with a dollar sign.
But researchers have spent a couple of decades on a second kind, the kind people build themselves. Somebody trying to estimate something unfamiliar starts from a related thing they do know and works outward. And that adjustment stops early. Not when the answer gets accurate. When it starts to feel plausible.
So nobody hands your prospect a starting number. They assemble one. Out of whatever’s in front of them, and then they nudge it just far enough to feel finished.
Which leaves one question. What are they assembling it out of?
whatever they can see
There’s a lot of research on how people decide whether a business is credible online and the answer that keeps coming back is not flattering to any of us.
They look at it.
In one Stanford study, more than 2,600 people went through live websites and wrote down why they trusted or didn’t trust each one. The thing they mentioned most was how it looked. Not the credentials, not the claims, not the case studies. Just the look, in about 46 percent of the comments, ahead of how the information was organized and ahead of what the site actually said.
And it ran highest in the categories where the stakes are biggest and the work is hardest to check before you buy it. Finance sites pulled visual comments more than half the time.
Now put your own business in that frame. The harder your work is to judge from the outside, the more weight lands on how you present it. That’s not people being shallow. It’s people using the only evidence anybody gave them.
So the anchor gets built out of your homepage, your photos, your proposal, the spacing, the fonts, the pictures of you. Then your price shows up and gets measured against it.
why explaining it afterward doesn’t work
Here’s the part that stings a little.
You’d think you could just warn people. Tell them not to jump to conclusions, walk them through your reasoning, and they’d adjust. Researchers have actually tested that. A recent replication with more than 650 people found the anchoring effect held up fine and found no evidence that warning people about it made any difference at all.
You can’t tell somebody not to be anchored and have it work.
Which means the standard playbook is set up to fail. Add a paragraph about your process. List what makes you different. Explain, patiently, in good faith, why the number is fair. All of it lands after the anchor is already sitting there, and moving somebody off an anchor is reliably a shorter trip than it needs to be.
You can’t argue a person out of a number. You can only hand them a better one to start from.
two objections that sound identical
These sound the same on a call, however, they’re completely different problems.
“That’s more than I expected.” That’s anchoring. They had a figure in their head and yours came in over it. They can afford you. Their expectation got built out of the evidence you gave them and the evidence was pointing lower than your price.
“That’s more than I can spend.” That’s a budget. Their number and your number are both real and they don’t overlap. Nothing about how you present yourself changes that one. Your job then is to deliver value over cost.
Start writing down which one you’re actually hearing. If most of your no’s are the first kind, price isn’t your problem and discounting will make it worse, because now you’ve confirmed the low number they walked in with. What you have is an evidence problem, and it’s the reputation gap showing up in a slightly different outfit. The business moved. The stuff people use to price you didn’t move with it. I talk about this here.
the evidence problem is mostly visual and it’s fixable
If the anchor gets built before anybody reaches your price, then all the useful work happens upstream of the price. On the pages they hit first.
That’s the part photographs do that a paragraph can’t. Not because pictures are magic. Because they’re the biggest thing on most pages, and big things get used. A set of images that shows a business running at the level you’re actually running at raises the starting number before your price ever enters the room.
Generic imagery doesn’t fail by sitting there neutral. Nothing sits there neutral. Stock, or a headshot from an older version of your business, or a set that could belong to anybody in your field, all of that still sets an anchor. It just sets a low one.
Which is why I want to have a conversation before anybody picks up a camera. The question isn’t what you want to look like. It’s what your work needs to look like it costs, and then everything after that is just production.
one thing to take away
Your price is the second number in the conversation.
Go look at your own site the way somebody who’s never met you would, and ask what number it suggests. If that’s lower than what you charge, you already know what to fix, and it isn’t the pricing page.
Eric Coleman is a brand photographer in Austin, Texas.
When you’re ready to look the part click here
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.
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.
