What spaghetti sauce teaches us about PERCEIVED VALUE...

No matter what service or product you provide, perceived value is the key to selling it. Every time you (or your customers) make a purchasing decision, you subconsciously calculate what you are willing to pay using a calculation involving Quality, Service, Desire, Convenience, and yes- Price (although price is a surprisingly small part of the calculation- consider how few times you purchased the absolute cheapest version of the thing you were shopping for over the past month).

BRANDS are the key driver for determining quality. Even if you don't consider yourself "brand aware," every day you make purchasing decisions based primarily on branding- in fact it is difficult for you to assess quality without brands. For example, here are some products: shoes, automobile, television, coffee. Are you having trouble figuring out how much you should expect to pay for each? Okay, let's try again: Nike, Jaguar, Samsung, Starbucks- I'll bet that helped.

The point is, making your customers aware of brands helps you differentiate your product AND (assuming the product performs well) increases customer loyalty. For example, let's say I'm managing an optometric practice. My optician is top notch, and we provide only the best progressive lenses (Varilux?). However, when my optician dispenses eyewear, he refers to the lenses simply as "progressives." Of course, the patient is completely satisfied with the performance of their "progressives," but a few weeks later she sees an ad that reads "Progressives and Frames- $99 complete." Considering she paid several times that price for the "progressives" she purchased at my office, she can't help but be tempted by a less expensive price for (in her mind) the same thing. If instead my optician had specifically referred to her lenses as "Varilux progressives" (perhaps with a simple benefit statement), her thought process changes to "I wonder if those are Varilux progressive lenses?" Of course, if she bothers to check (and most consumers will simply assume they aren't) she'll learn the $99 offer is for something other than what she purchased from my office. Furthermore, when she needs to replace her glasses, she'll be looking for Varilux progressives, and she knows she can get them at my office (and that's how branding increases loyalty).

Still don't believe you make decisions based on product brands? Okay, your spouse sends you a text asking you to pick up spaghetti sauce on the way home tonight. For most of us, the word that immediately pops in our head is either "Ragu" or "Prego" (the two most popular brands). We don't bother spending 5 minutes looking at all the different sauces in our grocery store, we just go the aisle, look for the brand we've been eating since we made our first spaghetti dinner in college, and go on our way. The brand tells us exactly what to expect from what is in the jar... and that's what spaghetti sauce can teach us about perceived value. Whatever products you provide, specify the brand when you want to differentiate on quality. #essilorlife #perceivedvalue