Will You Pay More For Less?

Filed in archive Buying Stuff on February 13, 2008

Marketing pro Seth Godin's has an interesting post on whether the "packaging" of a product or experience that includes a lot of waste could be a turnoff to your audience in these "green" days of ours. This got me to thinking about instances in which we are willing to spend more on a product or service to get less of that product or service in return. Here are my random thoughts on this topic, which I could take in a million different directions...

If you buy Oreos instead of buying the store-brand sandwich cookie, you're making the decision to spend more money for fewer cookies. Why? Because you think Oreos taste better and you'd rather have fewer of the good-tasting thing than more of the inferior product. (This is not an indictment of store brand, btw; I've found many tasty and cheap store brands.)

Here's another: organic foods. Many people are willing to pay more for those brownish organic bananas than the nice perfectly-yellow non-organic ones, even though they taste the same. (Don't tell me they don't taste the same.) Why? Because organic buyers believe the organic banana has less or no pesticides on it so it is healthier to eat and/or it is not contributing to greenhouse gases and ruining the environment.

Another example: As I've written previously I recently bought a new Toyota highlander. The first question everyone asks when I mention the vehicle is "Did you get the hybrid?" Well, no, I didn't, sorry. I would've liked to, but I couldn't justify the price difference in my head. I wasn't willing to pay the extra cost for basically the same product. And now I feel a little guilty every time someone asks me with that head-in-the-clouds smile on their face, "Did you get the hybrid?" They'd like me a lot better if I said yes. Maybe if I had bought the hybrid I would have bought it less for the environment and more for the fact that these people would think I was pretty awesome. I should've considered this benefit at greater length.

There are rural places where you can buy acres and acres of land for less than the price of a McMansion on 0.1 acres near a major city. Why are we willing to pay so much more for so much less near the city? It's got its benefits, such as the fact that most of us need to work near a decent-sized city if we want to make a decent-sized living.

I'm not sure what my point is, and not sure how relevant it is to Godin's point (which is the fact that some consumers are going to walk away from companies that over-"package" their product or service with wasteful extras that serve little to no purpose). I just think it's interesting.

Where are you willing to spend more to get less?